Fiction

It's what happens when nothing happens that makes Nobody Move tick so well. With heavy nods to noir masters Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and perhaps even Philly's own David Goodis, Denis Johnson's story does justice to their legacy and even shares their humble roots (the novel began life as a serialized story running not in the pages of a dime-store pulp magazine, but in the glossy Playboy). Jimmy Luntz is a gambler and a loser. Naturally, he owes some guys some money. Not much by Hollywood standards, but enough to warrant a tough guy coming after him in a copper Cadillac Brougham. Following hired goon Gambol's entrance is the sexy dame Anita, a few gallons of alcohol, $2.3 million, a snitch, a crooked judge and lots of blood. One minute finds Jimmy (the kind of guy who "wasn't wearing a Hawaiian shirt at the moment but undoubtedly owned several") being driven north out of Bakersfield to what's sure to be an unpleasant meeting with Gambol's boss; the next he's yelling into a pay phone, ears ringing, firing up a smoke and calmly reporting the location of the bagman he's just shot. Johnson's deft character touches and poetic scarcity of language move the novel's action between Jimmy and Anita forward and backward in time, until somewhere, somehow — and without wasting too many words — several players are dead and the survivors stumble out of their desperate nightmares.

-Char Vandermeer

Etta

For his first novel, Philadelphia news man Gerald Kolpan reaches back to an imagined version of what Etta Place's life might've been like during her time and tenure with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid's Wild Bunch. The hellcat could — as legend tells us — shoot, screw and steal with the best of them. So Kolpan takes that Etta, turns her into a Philadelphia socialite on the run with Kill Bill-like circumstances, and explodes her across a mix of historical incidents and fictional landscapes with real-life characters — Annie Oakley, the boys of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, Eleanor Roosevelt — doing possibly real things. This mix could have been absurd and mawkish, but Kolpan avoids such silliness. He also avoids the obviousness of the crude: Rather than be ribald and Deadwood-esque, as most modern Westerns appear, Kolpan's chatty character-run horse opera is stately, bloody and romantic — the lit-equivalent of Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller. There's a smallish cinematic luster to most of Kolpan's proceedings; Etta's finest moments occur in smaller pairings and theatrical two-person acts (her vicious meetings with primary nemesis Kid Curry are best when they're mano-y-womano), with diary entries wound throughout. That doesn't mean Kolpan eschews big journalistic largesse. He makes a scene, puts a headline atop it but waits till the third paragraph to let the blood start trickling and his smirking commence.

-A.D. Amorosi

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Pride and Prejudice is arguably one of the best love stories ever written; by many readers' standards, impossible to improve upon — that is, unless zombies are added. Seth Grahame-Smith reanimates Jane Austen's classic by adding elements of gore, death, cannibalism, war, ninjas and combat to make a perfect story even "perfecter." By delicately weaving carnage into the original text, Grahame-Smith enables readers to view characters in a new, ass-kicking light. Even the most mundane passages of Pride and Prejudice become wildly entertaining as zombies are beheaded by delicate ladies in formal attire, causing onlookers to politely vomit. Enhanced by 20 bloody, old-timey illustrations, this novel is flawlessly executed with the prowess of a skilled ninja whose well-spent hours in the dojo have enabled him to perfect the craft of deadly novel writing.

-Lauren Fleming

Waveland

The Waveland that figures as the title for Frederick Barthelme's new book is an entirely real place. On a map, it's about halfway between Biloxi and New Orleans, and the book's action takes place in the winter of 2006. This puts Waveland a stone's throw and just more than a year away from Hurricane Katrina's final landfall. The landscape inhabited by Barthelme's characters — out-of-work architect and community college instructor Vaughn Williams; his ex-wife, Gail; his landlady and girlfriend, Greta; and various other tangentially connected folks — is still debris-choked and depopulated. Similarly, their lives show wear and tear, and Barthelme's carefully drawn, ordinary people carry their own bruises. Some are figurative and softened by time, others are literal and livid: The book centers on Vaughn and Greta moving in with Gail after a new boyfriend puts her in the hospital. But even with the resonance that a damaged coast suggests with these damaged lives, Barthelme resists the temptations of telegraphed symbolism. Katrina, like Gail's bruises or Vaughn's self-satisfied brother's visit, is no more than an event, however significant. Barthelme has built his reputation as a Carver-ish minimalist, or a Kmart realist, showing his characters falling out of love in a generic new South. But Waveland illustrates the beauty that sympathetic, precise examination of people and places, stripped of any grandiosity or overcomplication, can convey.

-Justin Bauer

Fool

Moving forward from wildly funny novels about vampires and demons, Christopher Moore applied his particular flavor of profane to the sacred in Lamb (Jesus' lost years), The Stupidest Angel (Christmas) and A Dirty Job (death). His latest whimsy, Fool — already a Publisher's Weekly top 10 bestseller — upends Shakespeare's King Lear through his bawdy jester, Pocket, who's prodded by a ghost ("there's always a bloody ghost!") to instigate "heinous fuckery most foul" in Lear's fractured court, where wicked daughters Regan and Goneril vie for daddy's kingdom. Moore weaves Pocket into Shakespeare's world, filling in plot holes (the unmentioned mothers of Lear's daughters) as well as biological ones (nonstop banging, shagging and bonking). Moore compares favorably to Tom Robbins — crazy adventure, clever twists, feel-good philosophy — crafting a laugh-out-loud romp with Bard-worthy smarts.

-Mark Cofta

Cutting for Stone

TV has acclimatized us to the practice of medicine as a backdrop for the everyday drama of relationships and mundane tragedies. In Abraham Verghese's hands, it becomes something grander: the nucleus of a lifelong, globe-spanning saga of personal discovery and tangled, multifaceted humanity. In other words, the stuff of epic literature. The physician/memoirist, best known for his mid-'90s account of HIV treatment in rural Tennessee (My Own Country), bookends his debut novel with two major surgical undertakings: the massively complicated 1954 birth of the narrator and his (temporarily) conjoined twin brother, in an Ethiopian mission hospital; and a climactic, high-stakes transplant operation in the burned-out Bronx. In the intervening decades, as our protagonist journeys from childhood to adolescence and beyond, the book dabbles almost inevitably in sex and postcolonial politics, but its uniquely intertwined core concerns of medicine and family remain at its heart. It's material rich with metaphorical resonance, and Verghese doesn't shy away from literary symbolism and sweeping, old-fashioned, novelistic plotting. But his romantic tendencies are balanced by careful attention to detail, both anatomical and emotional, which makes Cutting for Stone vivid, moving, deeply engrossing (and occasionally just gross) and richly rewarding.

-K. Ross Hoffman

A Fortunate Age

A Fortunate Age reads like Brett Easton Ellis' crack at The Big Chill screenplay, except there's no dead Kevin Costner. A group of Oberlin grads — a mix of starving artists and wannabe professors — comes together for the marriage of one of their own, jump-starting a rolling narrative that spans the late '90s to post-9/11 New York. Often overwhelming with minor details, the book moves along in fits and starts, never really exploring the depths of its characters. Rakoff often — and early — mentions the "cool" neighborhoods of Brooklyn where many of the characters live, their scoffing at the pre-Raphaelites, their disdain at having missed the days of The Partisan Review, and their familiarity with the writings of Hume and Heidegger — all of which may strike some as rather insular. But it all just comes off as a stereotype of young New Yorkers and may leave those from outside the Big Apple wondering if Rakoff is serious.

-Dominic Mercier

A Mad Desire to Dance

It's been more than a half-century since Night was first published, and as Elie Wiesel has aged, so have his characters. In his new novel he presents Doriel, an elderly Polish expatriate living in Brooklyn and struggling to deal with his "madness." The chapters explore Doriel's psyche from a variety of perspectives: his own jumble of thoughts, notes from his therapist, asides to his dead parents and sections of omniscient narration. Every voice shows a different facet of his character, but they all present the same questions: What is madness, and is Doriel mad? The novel's best chapters are presented from Doriel's point of view, jumbled and confusing, making for an unpleasant read. But then again, it must be unpleasant to be insane.

-Katie Karas

Philadelphia's chick-lit queen revisits her debut novel's quirky, curvy heroine, Candace Cannie Shapiro, as she navigates the tedious complexities of the mother-daughter relationship. Certain Girls picks up with Cannie's story as a famous (famous for being an author, anyway) mom with hopes of vying for her daughter's friendship on the brink of her bat mitzvah. Told from first-person perspectives of both Cannie and 13-year-old daughter Joy, each chapter weaves an all-too-familiar struggle between adult wisdom and teenage angst, especially as Joy struggles to carve her own identity despite her hearing aids, gay grandma, out-of-touch mom and adoptive diet-doctor dad. The book doesn't strive to share any lofty messages about life or love, but does manage to channel sympathy and humor at a plot-friendly pace, turning Philly into the veritable City of Motherly Love and Daughterly Affection.

-Natalie Hope McDonald

Shortcomings

Adrian Tomine’s tongue-in-cheek graphic-novel romance reads like a revamped Annie Hall, but with a soft spot for California instead of New York. Would-be hero Ben Tanaka is a pretentious, cynical pessimist stuck in a dying relationship with pretty-but-too-PC Miko. Between arguments over films about the Asian-American experience and Ben’s taste for white girls in porn and real life, Miko and Ben’s relationship suffers long until her exit to NYC. With his girlfriend gone, Ben turns to his outspoken lesbian best friend, Alice, for solace, falls for his exhibitionist co-worker and a blonde at a party. Between collisions with the fairer sex and an unshakable loneliness, Tanaka’s shortcomings begin to surface — and the self-loathing begins.

—Dianca Potts

Sag Harbor

True to Colson Whitehead’s reputation, his fourth novel is lyrical and hilarious. And because it lacks a plot, focuses only on the summer of 1985, and develops just one character — the novel’s self-deprecating 15-year-old narrator, Benji Cooper — lyrical and hilarious become all the more important. Within these limits, Whitehead layers in a catalog of ’80s pop culture and supplies a loving portrait of Sag Harbor, a Hamptons resort town with an African-American enclave where Benji has been shipped for the summer. Whitehead’s writing is clear and witty, meandering from clothes to music to food to girls as Benji hungers for diversions from the crushing boredom. The book sparkles with insights that never grow sentimental: Benji observes his older sister’s generational disdain for Sag Harbor due to the town’s “bourgie shit.” And though the novel reads more like eight great short stories about key themes (race, class, pressure to succeed) and insane stunts (ice cream sabotage, a BB-gun fight), the cumulative effect is more focused: We see that at summer’s end, Benji has subtly accrued some hard-earned self-confidence. In the end, Whitehead drops in a minor detail — Benji’s choice in shoes — that says volumes about what Benji learned over the summer, and who he’s decided to become in the fall.

—Matt Jakubowski

American Rust

With a looming economic storm cloud over our already rain-soaked heads, a book about a rundown Pennsylvania steel mill in the midst of its own depression might not help us forget our worries. But American Rust is an enlightening, almost heartwarming, tale despite its harrowing plot. Following the lives of two young men caught up in an accidental murder, each chapter flows from perspective to perspective — parents, sister, concerned police officer, etc. As the novel unfolds and each bit of information is revealed, Meyer explores the depressing reality of growing old, dealing with loss and what life means for people unwilling to detach from their humble beginnings. In the end, readers are left with a melancholy tale that forces us to question our own realities, which, relatively speaking, may not be so harsh after all.

—Lauren Fleming

The Believers

It’s difficult to stay engaged in a book when the main characters are so unsympathetic. But Zoë Heller has a talent for creating people who feel so lived-in, it doesn’t matter how unlikable they are. Heller’s novel centers around the ultra-lefty Litvinof family, which begins to fall apart when patriarch/celebrated civil rights lawyer Joel is felled by a stroke-induced coma. Heller’s women are exceptional: Joel’s wife, Audrey, is brash and foul-mouthed and will do anything to keep her husband alive. Daughter Karla is paralyzed with the inertia of depression, until she finds love with an Egyptian newspaper vendor. After a lifetime of atheism, her sister, Rosa, tries to fill the void left by unrealized ideals with Orthodox Judaism. These characters aren’t nice, and you wouldn’t want to be their friends. But they certainly feel real.

—Molly Eichel

A mother’s love is the basis of Scottoline’s latest page-turner, a melodrama that masquerades as a detective story. When Philadelphia newspaper reporter Ellen Gleeson speculates that her adopted son, is in fact, a missing/kidnapped child, she investigates to prove otherwise. Her doubts, of course, become the reader’s certainty, and the pleasure of Look Again is seeing how the clues and characters fall into place. While this happens all too neatly, some messy ethical issues arise, giving this apolitical story some depth. Scottoline tends to plays up the hoary genre clichés — from the plucky heroine getting a thud on the head, to Ellen’s “illicit” romance with her handsome bachelor boss. But even when the plot twists are telegraphed, or things get far-fetched — a DNA-collecting mission strains credibility — Look Again still manages to be quite satisfying.