Bookworm

Mary Ruefle reads the entirety of her glorious and gruesome essay about shrunken heads, the title essay in her book  My Private Property.

The original and indescribable writing of Diane Williams is showcased in over three hundred dazzling new and previously published shorts fictions from six releases,   The Collected Stories of Diane Williams.

Again Deborah Eisenberg demonstrates herself as a masterful and electric writer, in her new collection of seven stories,  Your Duck Is My Duck .

John Wray discusses writing about the extremes of subjectivity, and breaking the reader of expectations in his new novel,  Godsend .

Jeff Jackson’s  Destroy All Monsters: The Last Rock Novel  comes at the same story from radically different angles that echo and rewrite each other.

A voluminous correspondence of an intellectual friendship between two literary geniuses,   Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner , edited by Edward M. Burns.

Dramatic, emotional, and philosophical, Katherine Weber’s,  Still Life with Monkey,  is a profound book written in the old style, with depths orchestrated by the author.

In Barbara Kingsolver’s  Unsheltered,  char acters feel as if they did what was right in life, but get a bad deal at the end of their lives.

Mythical and lyrical, written in love, Leland de la Durantaye’s debut novel  Hannah Versus the Tree  is original work that speaks to our moment.

The restless imagination of Brian Phillips brings lyrical essays to a narrative border in his debut book,  Impossible Owls .

Evolution is a collection of all-new material by Eileen Myles, whose inspired poetry is a form of communication.

Ben Fountain writes with equal opportunity vexation, trying to make sense of what we’re doing in our lives, in his new book Beautiful Country Burn Again .

Susan Orlean’s The Library Book is about the cultural institution of libraries, with each chapter a source of its own excitement.

Beauty and despair woven into their history, twelve multigenerational urban Native Americans find ways to live in Tommy Orange’s  There There .

Gary Shteyngart’s  Lake Success  is about a hedge-fund manager billionaire who has lost track of what he once cared about and loved.

French Exit  by Patrick deWitt, a vastly amusing novel about a spider woman.

Edward St. Aubyn’s Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk, and At Last: The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels , recently adapted into a five-episode limited series on Showtime.

Samuel Nicholson edited three of Joshua Cohen’s books at Random House, including his recent collection of nonfiction, ATTENTION: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction.

Joshua Cohen’s collection of nonfiction, ATTENTION: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction, examines the effect of the internet and technology on the human mind.

Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration , by Mary Cappello, James Morrison, and Jean Walton, is a trio of novella-length autographical essays about graduate school students who love to read.

Joshua Mattson’s experimental debut novel,  A Short Film About Disappointment , pulls the rug out from under the reader.

B. Catling further discusses learning to write The Vorhh Trilogy by being within it.

In B. Catling’s The Vorrh Trilogy , a vast surrealist tapestry comes into being; cooperating with the reader’s desire.

Christian Kracht’s The Dead is an expectations bending book with more tricks than a circus.

Lydia Millet’s Fight No More is a book of improvised stories about people who live improvised lives in Los Angeles.