New Star Books: 17 books

Tim Conley's prose whipsaws between carefully observed realism and fantastic absurdity to create surreal, compact worlds. Whether they're sketching the familial fallout of a stentorian patriarch or teaching the eponymous dance moves to survivors of the apocalypse ("With the rise of the invertebrates,...

We live, by consensus, in an Age of the Metropolis, and the vast preponderance of scholarship about contemporary urban life has focused on the phenomenon of big–city life. But that is an approach that overlooks the smaller cities and towns where many of us choose to live. Whose Culture Is It, Anyway?...

Piranesi’s Figures is a romp through the magnificent ruins of at least two marriages and one attempt at child-rearing, and a gleefully reckless contortion of novelistic conventions, sexual practices, and family dynamics. Hannah Calder peers into hidden corners and under creaking beds with such relentless...