Also of interest...in dispatches from the suburbs

Nine Inches

by Tom Perrotta (St. Martin’s, $26)

Tom Perrotta’s ongoing interest in the residents of suburbia “marks him as the descendent of such chroniclers of small-town America as Thornton Wilder and Willa Cather,” said Alix Ohlin in The New York Times. In this story collection, characters come under pressure at work, school, or Little League and sometimes reveal ugly sides. Along the way, though, the author of Little Children manages to make community life itself feel like the book’s “most vibrant and fully developed character.”

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The Measures Between Us

by Ethan Hauser (Bloomsbury, $26)

“Bad weather as a manifestation of emotional turmoil is an old literary trick,” said Stephan Lee in Entertainment Weekly. But when Ethan Hauser decided to set his first novel in the Boston suburbs as the region braces for a devastating storm, he also had more useful tricks up his sleeve—like “beautiful prose and sensitive characterization.” The challenges these characters face—including infidelity, mental illness, and an unusual child—“prove more dramatic than any meteorological havoc.”

Duplex

by Kathryn Davis (Graywolf, $24)

“I can’t remember the last time I read a book so disorienting,” said Rosecrans Baldwin in NPR.org. Part of Kathryn Davis’s seventh novel is set in a world much like a 1950s suburb, except for countless discontented robots. And then there’s a second world that, perhaps, exists atop the first. Hard as it is to follow Davis’s imagination from one line to the next, reading this book is great fun. “Sometimes really good company, the interesting, mind-expanding kind, leaves you scratching your head.”

The End of the Suburbs

by Leigh Gallagher (Portfolio, $26)

Give Leigh Gallagher credit for not hating on the suburbs, said Josh Dzieza in TheDailyBeast.com. Like other urbanites, she’s predicting the demise of the sprawling, car-dependent suburb, but at least she’s not gleeful about it. Her real contribution is that she’s talked to a lot of the builders who are responding to the preference of Millennials for dense, walkable communities. Only well-off Millennials interest her, but given that those are the industry’s targets, “the focus is perhaps justified.”