Justin Taylor’s sharp first story collection documents the confusion of being young, disaffected and human.

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This version of the “Odyssey” claims to be based on fragmented narratives unearthed from an ancient rubbish mound.

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Peter Handke’s novel of Don Juan ponders beauty and eternity — and it’s not about sex.

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A provocative survey of how Jewish culture and historical accident ripened Jews for commercial success — and why that success led to so much misfortune.

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In Cathleen Schine’s novel, two sophisticated Manhattan sisters, one wildly emotional, one smartly sensible, come to the aid of their beloved aging mother.

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A memoir by an aide who assisted in the rise of John Edwards — and played a key role in the scandal that brought him down.

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The history of an early-20th-century crusader against a rubber baron’s abuses in the Amazon.

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David R. Dow is a Houston lawyer. His dark, raw memoir exposes death-penalty machinery that can’t be mediated by truth, logic or fact.

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A woman kidnaps her own 5-year-old and heads south with her boyfriend, causing headaches for all involved in this taut novel about letting go.

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Adam Haslett meditates on the financial crisis through this timely novel’s protagonist, one of the brains behind a rotten banking conglomerate.

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The life of Warren Beatty, a man as hungry for artistic control as he was for women.

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Poems that shun trickery and flirt with both beauty and boredom.

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Joseph Stiglitz has harsh words for Obama’s approach to the economic crisis.

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Clare Clark’s tale of a woman sent to Louisiana to marry a colonist she’s never met is told in the spirit of a 19th-century novel.

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Don DeLillo explores the radical manipulation of time in this novel, which brings an Iraq war planner, his daughter and a filmmaker together at a house in the desert.

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This slender mystery novel from Roberto Bolaño presents a surreal vision of prewar Paris.

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An appreciation of Little Richard, one of rock ’n’ roll’s originators.

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This history examines the moral, religious, artistic and political struggles gripping France before and after the Dreyfus Affair.

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The characters in Amy Bloom’s erotically charged, linked stories struggle with love and its loss.

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Louise Erdrich’s new novel is a portrait of an “iconic” marriage on its way to dissolution, and it appears to be seeded with deliberate allusions to her own marriage with the writer Michael Dorris.

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The author of “The Sexual Life of Catherine M.” now turns her attention to the infidelities of her lover and the agony they caused her.

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A Ph.D. candidate watches his professor throw over Matthew Arnold for Yahweh in this novel about the conflict between faith and reason.

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The downtown rocker Patti Smith’s memoir of her early career and her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe is a spellbinding, diverting portrait of funky-but-chic New York in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

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Rigorous essays on American higher education, by a Harvard English professor.

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Our enduring central struggle — the battle between the head and the heart — is enacted again and again in Robert Stone’s new story collection.

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