Fiction & Nonfiction
 Banksy: The Man Behind the Wall
by Will Ellsworth-Jones (St. Martin's Press)
Recognized as the world's
preeminent graffiti artist,
this bright, unassuming
Englishman has achieved
great monetary success
as well as enthusiastic
acceptance by the very
institutions that his work
so inventively mocks. From his early work in
the 1980s, to his collaborators and detractors
in the street art community, his highly
orchestrated exhibits, numerous loyal fans,
and much acclaimed movie, this thoroughly
engaging portrait of Banksy, the man and the
institution, reveals an icon whose playful political
images continue to impact society even
as he manages to retain his anonymity and
stay true to his values as an "outlaw
artist." -Erica
 Submergence
by J.M. Ledgard (Coffee House Press)
A British agent is held hostage
by jihadists on the coast
of Somalia, a biomathematician
explores the ocean floor,
and in a hotel on the French
Atlantic a chance encounter
links these two people across
the globe. Submergence is
balanced beautifully between the extremes
of life—compassion and violence, tranquility
and fear, possibility and destruction. We
stare down the barrel of a gun, breathe in the
wind off the sea, and we trust in the touch of
someone who was recently a stranger. We are
immersed, and we feel the weight of the world
all around us. -Casey O.
 Vampires in the Lemon Grove
by Karen Russell (Knopf)
Everyone's favorite literary
wunderkind is back and
she's all grown up. Best
known for last year's Pulitzer
Prize nominated novel
Swamplandia!, Russell's
latest work takes us back to
her short-story telling roots,
collecting far flung and fantastical tales but
delivering them with a calm grace, an elegance
that signifies the maturation of a great, promising
literary talent. From the titular story,
narrated by an aging lovelorn vampire, to the
horse barn populated by former US presidents
(now somehow trapped in the bodies of
Palominos and Bays) not for some time have so
many outlandish premises been handled with
such deft sincerity. -Candra
 How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
by Mohsin Hamid (Riverhead)
Hey, you! Yeah, you. How
would you like to make a lot
of money? I thought so. In
Mohsin Hamid's third novel,
you will learn just exactly
how one goes about getting
filthy rich in rising Asia—
the dos and don'ts of shrewd
business that you will employ, even as a young
village boy suffering hepatitis. This book is the
episodic adventure of a lifetime. With self-help
tropes at hand, Hamid universalizes life and
wealth with the right blend of earnest encouragement
and caustic sarcasm. Keep your eye
on your wallet and hop on: the bull market
doesn't wait for anyone. -Dave
 Red Doc>
by Anne Carson (Knopf)
By day a learned
Classics scholar, by night an
award-winning, visionary
poet, Anne Carson writes
like no one else alive. Red
Doc> is an action-packed
verse sequel to Carson's
groundbreaking Autobiography
of Red. Wielding nouns as verbs, rife
with synesthetic metaphor and propulsive
internal rhyme, Carson marries rich storytelling
with risk-taking poetic technique. From
musk oxen hallucinating on fermented gorse
to the exquisitely unspoken love between an
aging mother and her red-winged son, intelligent
imagination takes center stage. For all
its beautiful strangeness, Red Doc> is about
striving to be human within a torrent of chaos
and grace. -John
 Siege 13
by Tamas Dobozy (Milkweed Editions)
For those civilians lucky
enough to escape Hungary
after the siege of Budapest
in 1944, survival and the life
that comes after it are not
mutually exclusive. Siege 13
connects characters’ bleak,
scrounged existences during
WWII with their attempts at equilibrium
afterward—haunted by wartime acts of desperation
that blur the line between the valiant
and the despicable. Within Dobozy's language
of tormented memory is an enduring vitality
of human spirit that can be humorous, surreal,
and moving. This collection of short fiction is
as courageous in its detail of affliction as it is
beautiful in its sense of humanity. -Alan
 See Now Then
by Jamaica Kincaid (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
It's easy to fall into the
rhythms of Jamaica
Kincaid's novel about the
people we become in the
process of forming (and
dismantling) families. Told
in a nonlinear, multi-layered
fashion, this story is as
much a meditation on time as on particular
characters—a woman, her straying husband,
and their growing children. What was once
"sweet" within their relationships to one another
becomes, in some ways, ugly and yet the
kernel of the original sweetness remains, coloring
both the remembered past and (within
Kincaid's vision) the envisioned future. -Karen
 The Dinner
by Herman Koch (Hogarth)
"We were going out to
dinner," the middle-aged
narrator tells us as he and
his wife meet another couple
at an upscale restaurant in
Amsterdam. Immediately,
the caustic tone of his voice
draws us in, suggesting simmering
emotional complications. As each serving
of this seemingly cordial five-course meal
arrives, the couples (actually two brothers
and their wives) reluctantly confront startling
allegations against their teenaged sons. The
deliciously biting wit and insidiously shocking
conclusion of this international bestseller
makes for a sensational, unforgettable psychological
drama. -Erica
 The Drunken Botanist
by Amy Stewart (Algonquin)
History meets botany,
horticulture, delicious
recipes, and gardening
advice in Amy Stewart's
newest book, which takes
a "spirited" look at the
plants behind some of the
world's best-known alcohols.
Organized by alchemical process and plant,
Stewart explores the history behind each as
it relates to the alcohol it creates. Throughout
the book Stewart has selected recipes that
best highlight the unique characteristics of
each featured alcohol. Since reading this book
I haven’t been able to look at a liquor section
without seeing "the world's most exotic botanical
garden." This book is essential reading
for any gardening, history, or drink
enthusiast! –Justus
 Woke Up Lonely
by Fiona Maazel (Graywolf Press)
Fiona Maazel's writing is dangerously
addictive. Her story
is darkly humorous, with a
complicated and infuriating
cast of characters whose actions
are as uncomfortably
heart-wrenching as they are
genuinely horrifying. Fiendishly
clever and well crafted, this book will
raise the spirits of even the most ill-tempered
and skeptical critic. Snorting with pleasure
and a deep sense of satisfaction I immersed
myself in her storyline and refused to surface
until I had nearly drowned myself in it. I would
suggest pairing it with the likes of George
Saunders, Kurt Vonnegut, or Etgar Keret. -Jillian
 Facing the Wave
by Gretel Ehrlich (Pantheon)
Following the 2011 earthquake
and tsunami that hit
the Tohoku coast, Gretel
Ehrlich flew to Japan to see
the devastation firsthand.
She remained in Japan for
months, interviewing the
people who had experienced
the disaster and recording their stories. The
result is a collection of beautiful, simple,
tragic, and important stories. These are not
cold statistics released by the government and
news agencies. Alongside her observations as
she travels the ruined landscape, the stories of
those who went through and witnessed these
horrific events create a powerful portrait of
loss and resilience, different from anything
we've seen. -Justus
 Benediction
by Kent Haruf (Knopf)
The simple yet extraordinarily
rich lives in this
Colorado prairie town are
evocative of Willa Cather's
characters. As Dad Lewis,
the hardware store owner,
faces the end of his life, he
and his wife, Mary, must
come to terms with the choices they've made
regarding their now grown children. Young
Alice moves in with her grandmother after
the death of her own mother, while an elderly
mother and her spinster daughter find renewed
life in their relationship with this young
girl. And a preacher hoping for a fresh start
moves his family to town. These lives
and stories quietly intersect, and Haruf's
descriptions, set against this landscape,
are masterful. -Tracy
 Drunk Tank Pill
by Adam Alter (Penguin Press)
Why does a swastika elicit
the response it does? Why
do beautiful women get
preferential treatment? And
just what is it about the color
blue? Citing hundreds of fascinating
(and often disturbing)
social experiments to
elucidate these questions, Alter explains that
there are three levels of influence: our inner
world, our interactive world, and the world at
large. Within each of these are three sub-levels
of hidden cues we respond to, and whether or
not we are cognizant of them they inform our
every thought and action, including why we are
drawn to this book. -Holly
 A Long Day at the End of the World
by Brent Hendricks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Just over ten years ago, 334
bodies were found abandoned
to the grounds of the
Tri-State crematory in Georgia.
Bodies that had been
decomposing in caskets,
piled under abandoned pool
tables, and stacked into vats
for as many as five years. Brent Hendricks's
father was one of these unfortunate, discarded
victims. In a voyage poetically composed by a
man seeking significance in an act of neglect,
Hendricks recounts the horrors of violation
and the revelations of acceptance that accompanied
his sojourn to the Tri-State crematory,
and his quest through grief toward peace. -Candra
 A History of Future Cities
by Daniel Brook (Norton)
Rising out of the desert like
a mad architect's sketchpad
come to life, Dubai appears
to be a unique product of
the early twenty-first century.
But the promise of an
ultramodern, Western-style
metropolis in the East is not
a new idea. Daniel Brook spans three centuries
to show how four cities—St. Petersburg,
Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai—were transformed
from ambitious dreams into glittering
facades with similar successes, consequences,
and costs. The extreme poverty of the many
allows the extreme wealth of a few, and Brook
demonstrates how these cities of the future
have always been sites of massive shifts and
revolutionary change. -Casey O.
 This Close
by Jessica Francis Kane (Graywolf Press)
As I read Kane's new book of
stories, I was reminded of
these wise words: "Be kind,
for everyone you meet is
carrying a heavy burden."
The stories deal with the
mundanity of everyday life,
and the strain between family,
friends, strangers, and neighbors. There is
an ineffable reoccurring feeling one gets from
the characters, a delicate longing for connections
that remain just beyond their reach.
Kane is a marvel and her stories are among the
best I've read. I intend to share this very fine
collection with friends. -Greg
 My Bright Abyss
by Christian Wiman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Once in a while an intrepid
memoir turns its gaze on
the fractals created by art
and faith. Like Bird by Bird
(Lamott) and Walking on
Water (L'Engle), Christian
Wiman's slender collection
of essays spirals through
meditations on poetry, God, and mortality
as the author seeks to reconcile these moving
pieces of quotidian life, cancer treatment, and
the intangible mess of the supernatural. His
writing is at once expansive and dense—like
a hearty loaf of artisanal daily bread. This is
not a book to rush; this is one to savor. For its
beauty, its tenderness, and its near-sacred
respect for each molecule of the human spirit. -Dave
 The Lost Carving
by David Esterly (Viking)
Master woodcarver David
Esterly's account of replacing
a seventeenth century
masterpiece lost in a fire is
a beautiful exploration of
craft. He interweaves the
fragile beginnings of his
career with the story of his
greatest triumph, and he demonstrates the
patience, endurance, and humility necessary
to create objects of such exceptional beauty
and difficulty. Not just for carvers and woodworkers
(though make no mistake, they will be
in heaven here), the quiet wisdom of Esterly's
voice will resonate with anyone interested in
the daunting risk and sublime satisfaction of
following one’s deepest passion—mind, body,
and soul—for a living. -Casey O.
 Wave
by Sonali Deraniyagala (Knopf)
There is almost no language,
no description that can do
justice to the place this book
is written from. That very
quandary—what to say, what
to remember, how to convey—
is at the heart of the author's
own incredibly beautiful
and brave story. How to
carry on when all the people who define you
are swept from life in a seemingly arbitrary
heart beat—the tsunami that struck the coast
of Sri Lanka in December 2004)—makes this
a harrowing, compelling, and necessary book
to read. It's written too purely to be instructive
but is still more instructive of life, loss, and the
life-force of going on than anything else I can
recall. -Rick
 Middle C
by William H. Gass (Knopf)
Unraveling the disorientation,
disassociation, and
guilt of the post-WWII
immigrant experience,
Gass's latest novel follows
Joseph, a young boy from
the Austrian town of Berg,
across borders as his father,
an early conscientious objector, forces their
family to flee Austria and assume Jewish, British,
and American identities in order to avoid
a confrontation with their Austrian roots and
the heinous crimes committed by their country.
Into an adulthood obsessed by images of
apocalypse and haunted by windblown memories
of perfect chords, Gass's young character
eventually seeks to understand—like many
before him—why the fate he fears the most is
survival. -Candra
 Gun Machine
by Warren Ellis (Mulholland Books)
With the blood of his murdered
partner still cooling on
his skin, Detective John Tallow
accidentally discovers a
Manhattan apartment filled
with hundreds of guns, each
one mounted on the wall in
an intricate spiral pattern.
When examined by a pair of possibly insane
CSI technicians, it is found that each weapon
is tied to a previously unsolved murder, spanning
over thirty bloody years of the city's
history. Acclaimed graphic novelist Warren
Ellis has carved up a funny, frightening, and
tense cat-and-mouse caper featuring a detective
who checked out of his job years ago and a
serial murderer who could be the most deadly
in history. -Rich
 Always Apprentices
ed. by Sheila Heti, Ross Simonini, and Vendela Vida (Believer Books)
From the pages of The
Believer Magazine come
twenty-two conversations
between writers. Don DeLillo
and Bret Easton Ellis discuss
the merits of the then newish
volume of re-edited Raymond
Carver stories. Barry Hannah
talks with Wells Tower about why he would
have advocated for editing Moby Dick. Christine
Schutt and Deb Olin Unferth take on the
musicality of Emily Dickinson. Collected over a
period of five years, these conversations often
move beyond the realm of writing into the
absurd, the mundane, and the sacred. -Holly
 The Burgess Boys
by Elizabeth Strout (Random House)
Every family has its secrets,
and for Bob and Jim Burgess,
leaving their Maine childhood
behind seemed the
only way forward. Their
sister Susan chose to remain
in Maine with her son Zach,
and adult life assumed a sort
of quiet predictability for the Burgess siblings.
That is, until Zach throws a frozen pig's head
into a mosque full of worshippers, and there is
talk of charging him with a hate crime. Pulitzer
Prize winning author Elizabeth Strout is a
master of peeling back the layers that make up
prescribed roles and family dynamics, bringing
to light some deeply buried truths. -Laurie
 Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
by Mary Roach (Norton)
Mary Roach, once again, has
written a book on
science that is stimulating,
humorous, and fun to read.
She guides us on a fantastic
voyage down the pie-hole
and out the nether hole—
exploring everything in
between. There are healthy helpings of arcane
knowledge about smell in relation to taste,
saliva and its healing and cleaning properties,
the importance of "crunch" in food, and the
humorous and horrible reality of dying of constipation.
You will come away with a greater
understanding of your wondrous digestive
tract. To paraphrase the old folk song, I urge
you to travel "thirty feet on the alimentary
canal." -Greg
 Walking Home: A Poet's Journey
by Simon Armitage (Liveright)
For nineteen days and 256
miles poet Simon Armitage
walked the Pennine Way,
also known as the "backbone
of England." Traveling north
to south, he walked toward
his boyhood home of Marsden,
through bleak and
difficult stretches that often defeat the hikers
attempting to walk the whole trail. But Armitage
did more than just hike. In exchange for a
bed, Armitage gave poetry readings, and he
passed the hat—or in his case a sock—to help
pay for the journey. Following Armitage on his
ramble through rural England offers a unique
view of how environment shapes character. -Greg
 Ghana Must Go
by Taiye Selasi (Penguin Press)
In Ghana Must Go, Taiye Selasi
makes of an exceptional
family a most compelling,
exceptional novel. I haven't
read anything so psychologically
astute and dead-on
heart-true in an eon—what
happens over time between
a husband and wife, between parents and children,
between siblings—the pacts, betrayals,
inheritances, aspirations, mysteries, and revelations
that make for family life, that make
for any life. And with its arrivals and departures—
Accra, Lagos, Boston, Baltimore—this
becomes a singular story of the world today—
vast, epic, and global, yet incredibly intimate,
in-this-very-house close. Woven through is a
charged, lyrical language that carries the great
weight of this story with grace, assurance, and
a deft light touch. -Rick
 This Is Running for Your Life
by Michelle Orange (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
A feisty and free-ranging
collection of essays, This
Is Running For Your Life
includes Michelle Orange's
observations on film, old
flames, feminism, running,
the passage of time, the
weird and intimate bonds
people have with celebrities, the fusion of neuroscience
and marketing, Ethan Hawke, war,
politics, and death. Amusing and incredibly
personal, these compulsively readable essays
are written in an intelligent conversational
style, and Michelle Orange ingeniously weaves
these topics together to form an ineffable,
entertaining, and thought-provoking whole. -Jillian
 Hand-Drying in America and Other Stories
by Ben Katchor (Pantheon)
In this extraordinary
collection of 159 graphic
stories, we get unique
and imaginative looks
and insights into architecture,
advertising,
urban life, and
modern times in America. From cartoonist
and New Yorker contributor Ben Katchor, this
is a truly unusual, witty, surreal, and perplexing
set of narratives. His series of graphic
strips covering everything from the mundane
to the disturbing will have you engrossed for
hours, and perhaps change the way you look at
our culture for good. -David
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