Maybe the finest thing about 'Scrapper' is the way in takes us into a deep-pore underworld that’s rarely explored in even the best books about Detroit.

'Gold Fame Citrus' takes an important step away from the moral convenience of cataclysm-as-metaphor -- or, in lesser novels, cataclysm-as-plot-starter -- toward an angrier, more urgent form that insists its reader do more than wallow in free-floating anxiety about the future.

What matters most to Clune is not so much the advocacy of computer games. What matters most is simply the undeniable fact that he’s poured so much time and dreams, thoughts and hopes, moods and memories into these games and that, as a result, a serious part of his childhood was shaped by them.

After a fashion we stop questioning how much of what we are reading is memoir and how much of it isn’t, and simply surrender to the elegant, limpid prose.

'Bright Dead Things' offers many answers, but is equally appealing for its questions: “Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented / the contentment of the field. Why must we practice / this surrender?” May our poems always be wild.

At this point you’re probably laughing. You probably think that 'The Story of My Teeth' sounds like performance art, which it might be, or like an MFA candidate’s anxiety-induced nightmare.

Is it fair to consider deWitt in terms of a binary between high and low? Is his work entertainment, something to get us off? Or is it original, beautiful, communicating deep ideas? Do we need to pick?

Meno's book makes visible the typically invisible victims of unjust economic policies. It makes these characters people — flawed and beautiful. It resists too much judgment or proselytizing and explores complex situations with appropriate complexity.

It is difficult to avoid the impression that Gauvin’s English isn’t quite up to Toussaint’s French.

Iceberg Slim, brutal pimp turned popular author, received a fraction of the royalties due him -- which meant, ironically, that he ended up getting pimped by his own publisher.

The big stuff, globally speaking, is never really what matters in Franzen's novels — not nearly so much as love, anyway.

Didion possessed the luck of serving as a human tuning fork for the anxieties of her age and the dogged curiosity to pursue those anxieties wherever they led.

Unlike many young writers, Milward's gaze isn’t directed at his own navel, but outward at the rough, strange history of the state that formed him.

Clarice is a writer obsessed with language, how it moves and breathes, how far it can be pushed and pulled apart, how it breaks down.

We want, desperately, to be convinced we’re wrong about our leaders, and it’s our democratic irrationality that we open ourselves up for persuasion every election cycle. Citizens stoke the national appetite for speech, and speechwriters ensure there’s enough to go around.

Nobody was a more astute chronicler of the post-war crisis of the female mind in America than Shirley Jackson.

Here is a snapshot of our time, grim and funny and unreal.

Smith charts the wake left by the words. She seems most interested in talk: a genre without form or discipline, that can match the mess of grief. Through sentences slung and stuttered, forced to double back and revise, people give and receive solace.