Alissa York's Fauna Random House, 2010 What is so remarkable about Fauna is that it is all-of-a-piece. (It's exactly the kind of book that makes me proud to be a reader.) From its beautifully crafted outer covers: a soft, earthy brown -- imprinted with a turtle. Underneath its rich burgundy
James Fitzgerald's What Disturbs Our Blood Random House, 2010 At first glance, James' Fitzgerald's might seem like a charmed life. But What Disturbs Our Blood would not have come into being if that had been true. It takes some digging (in the archives) and some prying (from the mouths of
Nicholas Ruddock's The Parabolist Doubleday, 2010 It's ironic. One of the women in Nicholas Ruddock's novel is thinking about the heroines of Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina. "Look at all those passionate women, the ones in novels, the ones who wore their hearts on their sleeves," she says. "They all
James King's Étienne's Alphabet Cormorant Books, 2010 Stephen Chambers has been charged with the task of presenting Étienne Morneau's memoir. (I Googled him, but he is fictional; I fell for it book, spine, and thinker.) Morneau, himself, before he died, had tried for six months to write a conventional autobiography, but he
Rabindranath Maharaj's The Amazing Absorbing Boy Knopf, 2010 "Useless! Completely kissmeass useless nowhereian." That's how Uncle Boysie describes Samuel's father. "Your father was a big inventor in Trinidad, you know...[b]ut the only thing he invent was a scheme to get out of the island." But talk of his father's neemakararam
