Forrest Gander Shoemaker & Hoard ($24) by Elizabeth Robinson Forrest Gander’s book of essays A Faithful Existence complements the author’s poetry handsomely, opening the heuristic properties

Walter Benn Michaels Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company ($23) by Brigitte Frase On the television “reality” series Survivor, a group of people is dropped into a

Jane Gentry Louisiana State University Press ($17.95) by Matthew Duffus Jane Gentry is a poet of formidable strengths, able to delicately intertwine speaker and place

Ben Lerner Copper Canyon Press ($15) by Joyelle McSweeney The critic Jed Rasula offers a seminar on the Kafkaesque, focusing on the appropriation of Kafka

Ilan Stavans Triquarterly ($22.95) by Katie Harger Ilan Stavans, a well-known cultural critic and Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Studies at Amherst College,

Michael Gardiner Polygon ($22.50) by Spencer Dew “There are more escalators in Tokyo than in any other city in the world.” So begins this debut

Chris Adrian McSweeney’s Books ($24) by Kelly Everding Humankind’s attraction to end-of-the-world scenarios might indicate some underlying guilty consciousnesses—whatever we’re supposed to be doing here

by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer Clare Dudman is a remarkable writer of mostly historical fictions who has garnered praise from The New Yorker and Entertainment Weekly, among others.

Thomas Pynchon The Penguin Press ($35) by Scott Esposito Thomas Pynchon's modern picaresques are best when they dazzle. His masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow, remains his most staggering