There comes a point early on in Stewart O’Nan’s novel The Good Wife (2004) when you realize, with dismal certainty, that you aren’t reading the story of a young pregnant woman whose husband is serving twenty-five years to life in prison for a murder he may or may not have committed, but rather, the bloodless story of a woman who waits for her husband for twenty-eight years. It is a novel about marking time, about making ends meet, about a disappointing mother­hood, and about a long, unrewarding marriage. An old-school formalist, O’Nan ensures that we really suffer the passage of

Poet Matthea Harvey creates a universe of her own but doesn’t post signs telling readers how to get there or get around after arriving. And this lack of authorial direction is precisely why her poems are so wonderful. In Modern Life, each reads like a stern and glorious fable of freakishness. The idiosyncratic world they inhabit reflects maddeningly back on our own: The sun (“yellow provocateur”) materializes beneath an umbrella only to be dumped at a lighting store (“Let it feel like everyone else”). Moons, meanwhile, bereft of their planets, suffer the indignity of orbiting the dinner plates that emerge

In a future land called Nation, late-stage capitalism and an unchecked faith in technology have wreaked planetary havoc: “Distressed survivors huddle illustratively or claw up cliffs or weep on overpasses dressed in neon, rainsoaked T-shirts screenprinted with the slogans of corporate sponsors: Product is Life. Life is good.” Earth has been pushed beyond what its “immune system” can bear. The environment befouled, people eat synthetic honey and drink chemically constituted milk. The Continuous Heritage Board produces propaganda for nonstop viewing on ubiquitous “filescreens,” and personal liberties are severely limited. There are vast areas of Nation that are off-limits to the

Turns out, it took a while for God to die. He lingered, barely coherent, through the first years of the last century, until He understood that modern poetry would happen. Then He seemed at peace and let go, knowing the universe would soon fill with imaginative new forms as poets reinvented the divine. Generations of twentieth-century poets did just that. And among contemporaries, no one has made so much of heaven’s silence as Jay Wright, whose verse constitutes a humane, enduring, and fiercely thought-out redivination of the world. His work evokes the fervor that underlies the creation of myths, as

A Golden Age is meant as testimony. Using her family’s experiences as inspiration for her debut novel, Tahmima Anam tells the story of the Indian subcontinent’s other partition—the nine-month war that ended in 1971, separating West and East Pakistan into Pakistan and Bangladesh. Anam, an expatriate Bangladeshi and an anthropologist by training, is a keen, sympathetic witness for her heroine, Rehana Haque, a widow living in a middle-class enclave of Dhaka.

A down-on-his-luck visionary has conversations with the love of his life, a pigeon. An autodidact builds a time machine and makes a date to fly it with his best friend, a night watchman at the New York Public Library. An army mechan­ic comes home from the war against Hitler—or perhaps from the future—to court a chambermaid, who steals the visionary’s notes for a death ray. Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, Mark Twain, and the old Pennsylvania Station put in appearances. Not quite science fiction, not quite historical fiction, not quite fantasy, Samantha Hunt’s new novel falls within an increasingly popular genre

Maybe all small towns have it: the myth of the golden boy (or girl), the one with irresistible flair and hard-nosed ambition, the kid everyone knows will go on to succeed—or, at the very least, manage to move out of the county. For the little town of Monarch, New York, the setting of Eli Gottlieb’s second novel, that favored youth was blue-eyed Rob Castor, eldest son of a handsome hardware-store owner and a woman who’d dreamed of becoming an actress. Rob was hip, ironic, charismatic: As his best friend, Nick Framingham, puts it, there was “something quicksilvery, musical, more sharply

In Bass Cathedral, the fourth installment of Nathaniel Mackey’s epistolary novel From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the author plots language’s intimate relationship with music, the point where sound and sense meet. N., the series’s reedman and trumpeter, continues to chronicle the musical, intellectual, sexual, and supernatural exploits of the jazz group Djband (né the Molimo m’Atet, the Mystic Horn Society, and the East Bay Dread Ensemble, among others) in his letters to a correspondent known as the Angel of Dust. This volume finds the band in the wake of their first record release, bemused by the