Gryphon
by Charles Baxter
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Charles Baxter sets his short stories in suburban Minnesota or Michigan, places that “lend themselves to a certain stoic passivity,” said Sam Sacks in The Wall Street Journal. He has “great talent” for staging slow reveals of the “substratum of disorder and rage” that lurks beneath the surfaces of such communities. But he also has one “maddening” tendency”: He often ends stories with “overtaxed metaphors” instead of “meaningful action.”
Binocular Vision
by Edith Pearlman
(Lookout, $19)
Edith Pearlman is a “keen observer of the human condition,” said David L. Ulin in the Los Angeles Times. The 34 stories collected here display an “acute command of language” and “ring with the truth of revelation.” A sampling: Describing a dying man’s thoughts about his wife and family, Pearlman writes, “How lucky he had been in her, and in their children, and in his work—and yet how willingly he would trade the pleasures of this particular life for life itself.”
Night Soul
by Joseph McElroy
(Dalkey Archive, $15)
“It’s best to read Joseph McElroy’s Night Soul slowly, warily even,” said James Gibbons in Bookforum. Each of these subtly brilliant, “urban to the core” stories hits a reader with “an unexpected swerve, a surprising shift of gears, or a disclosure of inconspicuous import.” Like his “monumental” novels Lookout Cartridge and Women and Men, McElroy’s short fiction “imparts a sense” of life as a process of “wading through a mysterious, ever-changing current.”
The Empty Family
by Colm Tóibín
(Scribner, $24)
Many of the characters in Colm Tóibín’s collection are “middle-aged Irishmen who have left home with no desire to return again,” said Heller McAlpin in NPR.org. They’re a “lonely lot” who find meaning in life’s “small connections,” and seem to prefer it that way. Tóibín’s “elegiac and elegant” prose calls to mind Henry James, who was Tóibín’s protagonist in the novel The Master, and who reappears here in the “masterfully multilayered story ‘Silence.’”
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Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
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Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
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The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
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Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
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Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
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Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
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You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
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Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”