Fiction & Nonfiction
 Truth Like the Sun
by Jim Lynch (Knopf)
Just in time for the 50th Anniversary of the 1962 World's Fair is Jim Lynch's homage to Seattle, Truth Like the Sun. First, following the fictional Roger Morgan (up-and-comer, dreamer, and fair director) as he navigates the politics and pressures of pulling the city he loves up by its bootstraps, and then the cutthroat Seattle P.I. reporter and Midwest transplant, Helen, as—decades later, post dot-com bust—she covers what might be the biggest story of her career. As these characters' stories unfold, so too does the story of our city's triumphs and failures. -Candra
 Blue Nights
by Ivan Vladislavic
illus. by Sunandini Banerjee (Seagull Books)
From its base in Calcutta, India, Seagull Books has been winning increased notice for its beautiful books and commitment to literary excellence. The publication of South African writer Ivan Vladislavic's new book stands out for reasons above and beyond; these linked pieces ruminate on stories and books, primarily on pieces not written—abandoned, set aside, let go. How the loss of these unwritten worlds is to be comprehended is made manifest in exquisite form here, with both Vladislavic's elegaic writing and brilliant collages by designer Sunandini Banerjee. A book for those who love books—real, physical books—and where they take us. -Rick
 The Mirage
by Matt Ruff (HarperCollins)
Imagine that the United States is not a superpower but an antagonistic rogue state. Seattle author Matt Ruff takes you on an intense and brilliantly-plotted journey into this new reality, a fun-house mirror world in which the United Arab States wield the political and military might, and the US is an occupied terror state responsible for the destruction of the Tigris and Euphrates World Trade Towers on 11/9/2001. A war on terror rages, and Christianity, not Islam is the religion shrouded in suspicion. Ruff has forged a mind-bending portrait of a world gripped by fear where nothing is as it seems. -Casey S.
 Amost Never
by Daniel Sada
translated by Katherine Silver (Greywolf)
What is young agronomist Demetrio Sordo to do when he finds his days in 1940s Mexico passing with depressing monotony? Devoting his life to the pursuit of daily sex is certainly a diverting option and the less travelled road taken by our hero in Sada's picaresque novel. The ambitious Lothario certainly manages to get himself into some sticky situations, but not necessarily the pleasurable sort. Sada's depiction of the landscape and people of this period and place is vivid and provides a marvelous framework inside which the machinations of family and society can churn young Sordo through like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. -Jamil
 The Fallback Plan
by Leigh Stein (Melville House)
From debut author Leigh Stein comes a poignant, darkly funny, and oh-so-true story of self-discovery. Following a traumatic senior year at Northwestern University, Esther reluctantly moves back in with her parents. Before the demons of apathy and depression have a chance to destroy her, she is encouraged by her mother to take a job babysitting a neighbor girl, May. Soon Esther has become confidant, co-conspirator, and confessor to May's young grieving mother and charming but floundering father. Amidst this madness, Esther is forced to either grow up or disappear within herself altogether. -Leighanne
 To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure
by Henry Petroski (Belknap Press)
Twenty years after his seminal engineering work, To Engineer is Human, Petroski revisits the inexhaustible topic of failure. From the dramatically rhythmic collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940 to the sudden failure in 2007 of a Minneapolis bridge during rush hour, Petroski provides sharp attention to the nuts and bolts of engineering while never losing sight of the enormity of what is at stake in any large-scale design. Petroski's wealth of evidence suggests that nurturing a humble and healthy respect for failure is the best way to ensure success. -Casey O.
 The Mountains and the Fathers: Growing Up on the Big Dry
by Joe Wilkins (Counterpoint)
Joe Wilkins grew up in a water-starved stretch of eastern Montana known as the Big Dry. With his new book, he returns to the unforgiving landscape of his youth in a series of wistful vignettes culled from vivid, often violent childhood memories. The Mountain and the Fathers is a wonderfully rendered portrait of starkly beautiful rural life and a haunting search for what it means to be a man in the American West. Wilkins is a poet; his eye for detail is clear and he writes with the narrative grace of high lonesome prairie wind. -Matthew
 Drifting House
by Krys Lee (Viking)
Postwar era Koreans and Korean Americans, living in the old country and the new, reinvent themselves in surprising ways in the face of loss, catastrophe, love, and changing families in Krys Lee's debut short story collection, Drifting House. Alternately spooky, touching, realistic, and fantastical, Lee's work invites readers to re-examine preconceptions of home, affection, return, and belonging, reflecting on the reach of mothers and motherland as family members move on, die, and are reborn. -Karen
 The Guardians: An Elegy
by Sarah Manguso (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
The life of Harris—close friend to writer and poet Sarah Manguso—could read like so many faceless deaths of the mentally ill: after years of suffering from schizophrenic breakdowns for much of his adult life, Harris finally surrendered in a violent, public way. In The Guardians, Manguso pulls her beloved friend from the obscurity of "an unidentified white man" with this personal and moving elegy. Writing with the distinct gifts of a poet, she introduces us to her friend as she knew him and illustrates the oftentimes inadequate ways we have of expressing love and the "insufficiency of explanation." –Molly
 True
by Riikka Pulkkinen
translated by Lola Rogers (Other Press)
Elsa is dying of cancer. Her granddaughter Anna spends time with her and finds a mysterious dress in Elsa's closet that belonged to a young woman named Eeva. The dress brings to the surface a long-silenced family history and poses a question about how well we know the people we love.
True is a psychological drama that explores memory and forgetting, the mind's desire to select and bend reality. Elsa's story demonstrates that lies can offer mercy, and that truth at best remains subjective, alterable, sometimes imagined, and easily disguised.
The 1960s and present day Helsinki rotate as a political backdrop. Riikka Pulkkinen, a celebrated, young, Finnish author, depicts the three generations story with skill and exceptional maturity. -Hana
 Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room
by Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)
Dyer writes his panegyric to Andrei Tarkovsky's difficult and rewarding classic Stalker (1979). Dyer meanders through the film scene-by-scene, pausing to give insight into the film's creation and follow its far-reaching influence through world cinema. He brings Stalker from the cinematic heavens and to the reader with his irreverent, hilarious, conversational style. A perfect introduction to Tarkovsky's classic that both delights and leaves the reader with a need to set out on their own journey into Zona. -Alex
 By Blood
by Ellen Ullman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
In 1970s San Francisco, a neurotic middle-aged professor rents a small office as he awaits investigation for improper behavior. Discovering he can hear conversations from the psychiatrist's office next door, he becomes obsessed with one particular patient: a young lesbian, adopted, and anguished about finding her real mother. He decides to become involved, researching her possible history, falsifying papers, perpetuating the belief that she was born a Jew, relinquished at the end of the war by a woman now living in Israel. Intense and compelling, this psychological drama, haunted by stories of the Holocaust, is as atmospheric as the foggy, eccentric city in which it is set. -Erica
 Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
by Jeanette Winterson (Grove)
Winterson's semi-autobiographical novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, told the story of a young girl's abusive childhood dominated by a fanatical, Pentecostal, adoptive mother with a special fondness for the Apocalypse. This memoir, written twenty-seven years later, fleshes out the details of those harrowing early years and leads us through the breakdowns and breakthroughs of the second chapter of her life. In her boldest stroke, Winterson, determined to vanquish the ever present shadow of her early abandonment, embarks on a quest to find her birth mother. This is a gripping, fierce, and deeply moving memoir of a woman in search of her own truth. -Laurie
 Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster
by Abrahm Lustgarten (Norton)
This exhaustive and accessible account uncovers British Petroleum's business and operations practices in the three decades prior to their 2010 oil rig catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. Lustgarten maintains that BP's single-minded pursuit of increased value for shareholders led to the cutting of critical safety measures in the field and resulted in large-scale industrial accidents, such as the Texas refinery explosion in 2005 that killed fourteen workers. These incidents, shocking in their own right, are absolutely chilling as precursors to one of the largest industrial and environmental tragedies in recent history. -Casey O.
 New Collected Poems
by Wendell Berry (Counterpoint)
When you read a Wendell Berry poem you can count on being moved. His poems are simple yet vast in their knowledge of the farm and the natural world; some poems throb with pure rage at the rape of the earth by concrete and greed, while others leave you wide open to a joy that runs as deep as the bluegrass fiddler a' stamping, young ones a' dancing, and the whiskey bottle a' passing. New Collected Poems features over four-hundred pages of poems, including his most recent works—"Entries," "Given," "Leavings," and many more—some dating back to 1964. -Jake
 Suddenly, a Knock on the Door
by Etgar Keret
translated by Nathan Englander, Miriam Shlesinger, and Sondra Silverston (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
In his three previous short story collections, Etgar Keret has shown an amazing ability to construct fascinating and fantastic short works that lay bare the human condition. In his new collection, Keret brings together thirty-plus short bursts of imagination that include tales of storytellers at gunpoint, liars coming face-to-face with their lies, wish-granting fish, and a whole host of people who are not what they appear to be. Keret's aptitude and imagination for short stories may know no bounds, and his mastery may be second to none. -Casey S.
 City of Bohane
by Kevin Barry (Greywolf)
Oh my god—Barry has written an incredible, rather unnerving, hilarious, brutal novel set in the not-so-distant future. It takes place in the Irish city of Bohane where the barbarians inhabit and control the city. Gang warfare is the norm. Barry writes in a gripping vernacular that explodes your preconceptions of how language can be used. The character and the atmosphere of the city is palpable and the people who inhabit the city are colorful and frighteningly well-drawn. The future is not looking too good in the City of Bohane. -Greg
 I Am an Executioner: Love Stories
by Rajesh Parameswaran (Knopf)
The cover says "Love Stories." In his debut collection of short fiction, Rajesh Parameswaran vivisects love the way Dr. Raju Gopalarajan does his patients. Each entry is an incision, and love is capable of devouring you. Take "Demons" for example: Savitri Veeraghavan accidentally kills her husband through an esoteric form of magical thinking. What spawns from there is like the love-child of Salman Rushdie and Edgar Allan Poe. I was continuously fascinated by Parameswaran's use of language and tradition to spin a collection of fiction so fantastical, so devious, I'm still not sure whether it's heart-warming or bone-chilling. -Dave
 The Good Father
by Noah Hawley (Doubleday)
Dr. Paul Allen, a diagnostic physician in a comfortable East Coast family, is confronted with an unthinkable premise and the most challenging investigation of his life. His grown son from a previous marriage has been charged with the assassination of a politician. He traces his estranged son's cross-country wanderings, analyzing with agonizing detail the childhood and adolescence of a boy once cherished for his compassion, but who has now left college, changed his name, and inexplicably, does not proclaim his innocence.
This gripping, superbly realistic novel shows, through the doctor's revelations, the mix of inconceivable truths and profound emotions that must be reconciled within families of every kind. -Erica
 Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas
by Dale Carpenter (Norton)
Flagrant Conduct is a fascinating account of the landmark 2003 Supreme Court decision overturning the last anti-sodomy laws in the US. The particulars of the case—Houston police officers investigating a report of a man with a gun instead arrested an interracial male couple allegedly having sex in a private apartment—turn out to be unclear, but a larger story emerges of a corrupt justice system in which gay, Black, and working class people are treated as second class citizens. It's a complex, compelling story, and a lesson for aspiring activists: change happens slowly and incompletely. -Karen
 Angelmaker
by Nick Harkaway (Knopf)
Joe Spork is the scion of a legendary British brigand and is raised as underworld royalty. Not wanting to cultivate that requisite reprobate je ne sais quoi within himself he abdicates his criminal birthright, attempting instead to follow in his grandfather's footsteps as a clock-smith. Then, nonagenarian super-spy Edie Banister turns up with her blind dog, Bastion, a mysterious device, and a retinue of corrupt public servants and sinister cultists hot on her trail. Theirs is a cunningly imagined adventure told in a smart, charming voice with the faintest whirring of clockwork menace in the periphery. Well played, Harkaway—keep 'em coming. -Jamil
 Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation
by Elaine Pagels (Viking)
The Book of Revelation has long been regarded as the strangest book in the New Testament, broadly interpreted as a prophetic vision of the end times. Pagels introduces the reader to the book that John of Patmos wrote, contextualizing it within the Roman Empire, and in most ways clarifying it as a commentary on the Romans. Pagels then goes on to discuss the many "heretical" Gnostic texts that are part of a larger body of prophetic or visionary texts in the Judeo-Christian tradition. A fascinating book for those with interest in the roots of the original text. -Greg
 Ragnarök: The End of the Gods
by A.S. Byatt (Canongate)
The Blitz has begun. A thin little girl flees London to the English countryside. She discovers, reads, and rereads a copy of Asgard and the Gods. Devouring the myths, she makes sense of her war torn world through the bewitching child-like chaos of Loki and his children: beastly Fenrir, voracious Jormungand, and deathly Hel. Partially autobiographical and entirely engaging, Byatt brings the elemental power of the Nordic pantheon alive in this newest addition to the Myths series from Canongate. -Alex
 When I Was a Child I Read Books
by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Robinson expresses a nostalgia toward the America she grew up in; a country made great by its focus on the common good. This ethos, she argues, is under attack by an obsession with market economy, lack of public discourse, reactionary thinking, and the undermined role of faith in modern life. In her ideal world, social institutions would be supported, and communities would be petri dishes growing the love for democracy. Defender of faith, Robinson attacks popular culture and atheism.
Some of these essays are personal, others are scholarly, even dense. A Pulitzer-prize winner for fiction, Robinson proves to be a thorough thinker. Her trademark eloquence and sophistication shines through the writing. -Hanna
 Love, an Index
by Rebecca Lindenberg (McSweeney's)
Can a person's absence be described by how their presence felt? Is it possible to take inventory of a disappearance? In 2009, Rebecca Lindenberg's partner, poet Craig Arnold, disappeared while hiking on a Japanese volcano, and her poems surround this event. She invokes graceful and startling collisions through time and space, she organizes places, conversations, sensations, and moments within an alphabetized list, and she weighs and measures the different sounds, feelings, and meanings of her words. She unwraps the past that surrounds the present, and in the end she perfectly conjures the inevitable inseparability of grief and love. -Casey O.
 The Lifespan of a Fact
by John D'Agata & Jim Fingal (Norton)
Is it acceptable for a writer of non-fiction to alter the facts of an article in order to make it more readable? After an essay written by John D'Agata had been accepted for publication by The Believer magazine, it was handed over to one of their fact checkers, Jim Fingal. This book is the correspondence between the two men over a period of seven years. It includes the original essay plus their correspondence, which is often terse, passive aggressive, and amusing. The book itself is short (a mere 123 pages) and worthy of long table-pounding, fist-pumping discussions on the ethics of journalism. -Jillian
 Autoportrait
by Édouard Levé
translated by Lorin Stein (Dalkey Archive)
Édouard Levé's Autoportrait is a hypnotic book of recollections in which the author's experiences, from profound to quotidian, are presented more or less at random in an unbroken stream of frank, declarative statements. Readers familiar with Levé will no doubt struggle to separate the book's benumbed tone with the author's own tragic ending. Yet his death should not overshadow the work itself, which is an intriguing meditation on memory and the art of writing about memory. Levé has crafted an autobiography without an author. There are no embellishments here, no digressions—nothing more than unfiltered memory. In short, an autoportrait. -Matthew
 Gods Without Men
by Hari Kunzru (Knopf)
This is the best kind of novel. Mysterious without being a trope-filled whodunit, magical without the help of fairies or fawns, intergalactic without (almost) anyone stepping foot on a space-ship, and filled with synchronicities and secrets that ripple through the centuries. Each thread of this story is as compelling as the last, whether you're following a Franciscan missionary through the desert, partying with hippies at a commune, or worrying over the fate of the autistic boy who seems to have disappeared into thin air, you will be absolutely transported and unwilling to put this one-of-a-kind novel down. -Candra
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A Greyhound of a Girl
Magritte's Marvelous Hat
Grave Mercy
The Great Cake Mystery
Oh No, George!
The Book of Perfectly Perilous Math