The characters have nothing to hope for but love, the one resource that can’t be rationed. The most depressing love affairs — emotionless, unrequited, exploitative — shine with promise in these settings.

The collection functions as a glimpse into a fascinating world of low-rent, high-risk stunt performing that’s largely faded away.

Thanks in large part to the drug war, more than 2 million people, disproportionate numbers of them black and Hispanic, are locked up in America’s prisons, giving us an incarceration rate of 750 per 100,000 people, higher than in Russia, China or Iran.

This is the kind of book that gets described as “a delightful romp” in press materials, and that’s not an inaccurate description of a book that functions beautifully as both send-up of high society and globe-spanning adventure story, but the novel has a deathly serious core.

As Murphy and Wasik stress again and again, this is a horrible disease; its grotesque symptoms, its uncurable-ness, its unpredictable incubation time, and its ideal vector--the dog--give it a unique fascination in the human psyche.

Do the ones who save us owe us anything? The Bellarosa Connection is fascinating as a study of memory and regret.

Though there's plenty of action -- and more than a little of the old Ultra Violence -- the real star here is Barry's language, the music of it. Every page sings with evocative dialog, deft character sketches, impossibly perfect descriptions of the physical world.

H.H. Munro wrote a great many light and often very funny send-ups of the stifling conventions and manners of the Edwardian age. But on the other hand, three of the first eight stories in the book involve corpses, with two of these being small children eaten by wild animals.

Hudgens doesn’t shy away from the brutality of life on earth -- the illness, the decreptitude, the humiliations and the teen suicides -- but the grittiness is never gratuitous, and his stories are infused with compassion and humanity.

Take it from a guy who hates reggae: I highly recommend picking up Heart of Dankness, whether you have a doctor's recommendation or not.

Sometimes I just want to read a book from beginning to end as quickly as possible. Arcadia was perfect for this venture, both because I was immediately in love with it, and because the book itself is about experiences that wrap around you until the outside world fades away.

The Book of Daniel is metafiction done right, by an author who cares as much about telling stories as he does about talking about telling stories.

I view Leonard not as some vaporous highbrow, but as a prolific, wide-eyed, and deeply erudite observer of the passing contemporary scene, equally at home writing about sitcoms and Nobel laureates, happy to show his face on television, and as willing to cash a paycheck from Playboy as from The New York Review of Books. For him, it was always the message, never the medium.

Every word I say or write about John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead turns instantly to mush. Yes, he's that good.

Zeroville is a work of surpassing strangeness and beauty. Vikar is possesed by movies, and he’s come to the promised land. He has a tattoo of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift on his shaved head, a red tear drop inked below an eye.

Let me get this out of the way: I hate running. I never enjoyed it: it hurt, it was boring, and I always worried about getting a sunburn.

Author Julie Salamon is blessed with that rare talent for not missing the forest for the trees while at the same time being able to see the trees.