A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.   This is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about stirrings and transformations. In an array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to escape the merciless progress of time in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

My Life as a Russian Novel , by Emmanuel Carrere

An unsparingly truthful account of love, betrayal, and the traps we set for ourselves, by France's master of psychological suspense.  In work after work, the critically acclaimed author Emmanuel Carrere has trained his unblinking gaze on the lives of others as they fight a losing battle with that most fearsome of adversaries—the self. Now, determined to escape the bleak visions of his narratives, he takes on a film project in the heart of Russia while also embarking on a new love affair back home in Paris. But soon enough, the diversion he seeks eludes him, intimacy proves too arduous, and Carrere is left peering into the dark mirror of his own life. Set in Paris and Kotelnich, a small post-Soviet town, My Life as a Russian Novel traces Carrere's pursuit of two obsessions—the disappearance of his Russian grandfather and his erotic fascination with a woman he loves but cannot keep from destroying. In prose that is elegant and passionate, Carrere weaves the strands of his story into a travelogue of a journey inward. Road trip, confession, erotic tour de force—this fearless reckoning illuminates the schemes we devise to evade ourselves and the inevitable payment they exact.

Beautiful Maria of My Soul , by Oscar Hijuelos

Hijuelos returns to his 1990 Pulitzer Prize winner, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, but this time he tells the story from the point of view of Maria, the young Cuban woman with whom Nestor Castillo fell in love and about whom he wrote the hit bolero, "Beautiful Maria of My Soul." Here we learn that while the stunningly beautiful Maria, a featured dancer in Havana's pre-Castro nightclubs, did indeed dump Nestor, prompting his exit for New York, she, like him, spent the rest of her life remembering their time together. Yes, it is a story of grand passion found, lost, and mourned, but it is also the story of a young, illiterate girl escaping a life of rural poverty and making a career for herself in the city. Nobody writes sex scenes like Hijuelos—graphic and poetic at once, a symphony of lush language, both sweaty and transcendent—but he brings the same passion to his descriptions of Maria learning to read (the way the letters of the alphabet arranged themselves in words and began to follow her everywhere). As with Madame Bovary, the life force fills Maria's passionate soul, but she also craves security, and that hardheadedness is both her salvation and her tragedy. To fully appreciate this novel's wondrous language and its multifaceted story, it needs to be read in tandem with Mambo Kings; to do otherwise would be like listening to a symphony through only one speaker. (Booklist *starred review*)

War, by Sebastian Junger

In his breakout bestseller, The Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger created "a wild ride that brilliantly captures the awesome power of the raging sea and the often futile attempts of humans to withstand it" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, Junger turns his brilliant and empathetic eye to the reality of combat—the fear, the honor, and the trust among men in an extreme situation whose survival depends on their absolute commitment to one another. His on-the-ground account follows a single platoon through a 15-month tour of duty in the most dangerous outpost in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley. Through the experiences of these young men at war, he shows what it means to fight, to serve, and to face down mortal danger on a daily basis.

Spies of the Balkans, by Alan Furst

Salonika, Greece, 1940.  In that ancient port, with its wharves and warehouses, dark lanes and Turkish mansions, brothels and tavernas, a tense political drama is being played out. On the northern border, the Greek army has blocked Mussolini's invasion, pushing his divisions back to Albania—the first defeat suffered by the Nazis, who have conquered most of Europe. But Adolf Hitler cannot tolerate such freedom; the invasion is coming, it's only a matter of time, and the people of Salonika can only watch and wait.  The spies begin to circle, and the center of this drama is Costa Zannis, a senior police official, head of an office that handles special "political" cases. Declared "an incomparable expert at his game" by "The New York Times," Alan Furst outdoes even his own finest novels in this thrilling new book. With extraordinary authenticity, a superb cast of characters, and heart-stopping tension as it moves from Salonika to Paris to Berlin and back, Spies of the Balkans is a stunning novel about a man who risks everything to right—in many small ways—the world's evil.

Losing My Cool, by Thomas Chatterton Williams

A pitch-perfect account of how hip-hop culture drew in the author and how his father drew him out again—with love, perseverance, and fifteen thousand books.
Into Williams's tiny childhood home his father crammed more books than the local library could hold. "Pappy" used some of these volumes to run an academic prep service; the rest he used in his unending pursuit of wisdom. His son's pursuits were quite different—"money, hoes, and clothes." The teenage Williams wore Versace sunglasses and a hefty gold medallion, dumbed down and thugged up his speech, and did whatever else he could to fit into the intoxicating hip-hop culture that surrounded him. Like all his friends, he knew exactly where he was the day Biggie Smalls died, he could recite the lyrics to any Nas or Tupac song, and he kept his woman in line, with force if necessary. But Pappy, who grew up in the segregated South and hid in closets so he could read Aesop and Plato, had a different destiny in mind for his son. For years, Williams managed to juggle two disparate lifestyles—"keeping it real" in his friends' eyes and studying for the SATs under his father's strict tutelage. As college approached and the stakes of the thug lifestyle escalated, the revolving door between Williams's street life and home life threatened to spin out of control. Ultimately, he would have to decide between hip-hop and his future. Williams evokes the subtle salvation that literature offers and recounts with breathtaking clarity a burgeoning bond between father and son.

Stories: All-New Tales, ed. by Neil Gaiman & Al Sarrantonio

The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to discover more—to find the answer to the question: "And then what happened?" The true hallmark of great literature is great imagination, and as Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio prove with this outstanding collection, when it comes to great fiction, all genres are equal.

Stories is a groundbreaking anthology that reinvigorates, expands, and redefines the limits of imaginative fiction and affords some of the best writers in the world—from Peter Straub and Chuck Palahniuk to Roddy Doyle and Diana Wynne Jones, Stewart O'Nan and Joyce Carol Oates to Walter Mosley and Jodi Picoult—the opportunity to work together, defend their craft, and realign misconceptions. Gaiman, a literary magician whose acclaimed work defies easy categorization and transcends all boundaries, and "master anthologist" ("Booklist") Sarrantonio personally invited, read, and selected all the stories in this collection, and their standard for this "new literature of the imagination" is high. "We wanted to read stories that used a lightning-flash of magic as a way of showing us something we have already seen a thousand times as if we have never seen it at all."

Lives Like Loaded Guns, by Lyndall Gordon

In 1882, Emily Dickinson's brother Austin began a passionate love affair with Mabel Todd, a young Amherst faculty wife, setting in motion a series of events that would forever change the lives of the Dickinson family. The feud that erupted as a result has continued for over a century. Lyndall Gordon, an award-winning biographer, tells the riveting story of the Dickinsons, and reveals Emily as a very different woman from the pale, lovelorn recluse that exists in the popular imagination. Thanks to unprecedented use of letters, diaries, and legal documents, Gordon digs deep into the life and work of Emily Dickinson, to reveal the secret behind the poet's insistent seclusion, and presents a woman beyond her time who found love, spiritual sustenance, and immortality all on her own terms. An enthralling story of creative genius, filled with illicit passion and betrayal, "Lives Like Loaded Guns" is sure to cause a stir among Dickinson's many devoted readers and scholars.