In her elegant debut novel The Fates Will Find Their Way, Hannah Pittard defies the odds; she takes a story we’ve all read before—a girl disappears, the lives of those left behind are changed forever in the aftermath—and manages to create something entirely original.

To find truth -- and in so doing, beauty -- in the game is the height of sportswriting, a genre usually mired somewhere between tawdry gossip and vitriolic hyperbole.

A quiet little miracle of a book.

He takes to task the Victorian obsession with categorizing, with trying to tame the wild, and makes a case for experiencing nature, for "green chaos."

I love The Water-Method Man. Consider it my best suggestion for a holiday pick-me-up—a panacea for turkey fuck-ups, family dust-ups, and TSA feel-ups.

I spent a great deal of time on tour this summer, reading at bookstores from southern California to New Hampshire, and I encountered Larry Watson’s Montana 1948 toward the end of all this, a hot day in Ann Arbor when I had some time to kill before an event.

Like a highly erotic Cheever novel, The Slap skewers the middle class while giving them their humanity and even, at times, a bit of sympathy.

The scope of Methland is vast. Nick Reding looks at every angle of the meth epidemic, from the political machinations affecting the sale of ephedrine to the Mexican drug cartels that move the drug across borders. The narrative focus of the book, however, is on a single small town.

These eight stories reveal Platonov as an incomparable stylist and an utterly singular sensibility. Indeed, as in only the greatest art, the two form a perfect unity.

“Well, you can remove mold with any sharp knife,” I said. “Then you can just go ahead and eat it.”

The cartoons pass and the narrative builds, and all the while, so does a sense that all this pain, all this unfiltered hate, had better be worth it—for this pathetic character and for ourselves.

Danielewski paints the page like a canvas, exploiting both knife-sharp prose, painfully clever post-modernist narrative devices, and typographical tricks to draw the reader into his tale of horror.

Both of these books were wild and weird, but they also were heartbreaking.

The effect was strangely thrilling, like watching a time-lapse photograph in reverse, the oak tree imploding into the seed.

Truth and lies, family and belonging are all woven together the Graham Greene way.