Also of interest ... in fiction and essay collections

Where the God of Love Hangs Out

by Amy Bloom

(Random House, $25)

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Amy Bloom’s stories “can mess up your heart and your head,” said Jeff Giles in Entertainment Weekly. This remarkable collection from the author best known for the novel Away features one series of tales about “a grieving widow and a stepson who get too close” and another series about middle-aged friends who start an extramarital affair. Bloom won’t make you “gasp at the beauty of her sentences,” but she may make you believe that “you didn’t just read these stories but lived them.”

Day Out of Days

by Sam Shepard

(Knopf, $26)

The playwright and actor Sam Shepard should be forgiven his “childish contempt for middle-class America,” said Alec Solomita in The Boston Globe. In this new assemblage of stories, poems, and other fragments, Shepard’s fictional alter ego is hashing out his internal conflicts, “often with great precision and beauty.” Shepard remains an appealingly restless cowboy, genuinely confused by his own unease and capable of sudden detours into “profoundly satisfying” storytelling.

Fun With Problems

by Robert Stone

(Houghton Mifflin, $24)

Robert Stone appears “not quite at ease” writing short fiction; he’s better on an apocalyptic scale, said David L. Ulin in the Los Angeles Times. But Stone’s new story collection is in places “a return to form” for the author of the masterful novel Damascus Gate. Stone’s characters are all architects of their own misfortunes; they look to drugs, new jobs, or new bedroom partners for temporary consolations in a world “bereft” of God. The best stories make their strivings feel like a high-wire act.

The Secret Lives of Buildings

by Edward Hollis

(Metropolitan, $28)

Edward Hollis is an architect who seems to think “the world might be better off with less architecture,” said Kirk Savage in The Washington Post. Mixing fantasy and fact as he discusses 13 major structures from the Parthenon in Athens to a hotel-casino in Las Vegas, Hollis shows us that buildings should be thought of as “shape-shifting and impermanent.” They are “made and remade” by each passing generation, and to fixate on preserving them is to misunderstand their purpose.