The unusually various characters in Nam Le’s excellent debut collection, The Boat, live between worlds. In “Cartagena,” for example, a teenage contract killer in Colombia moves from squalid shantytowns to his master’s opulent mansion; in “Hiroshima,”a young girl shifts unambiguously toward death in the days and hours before the atomic bomb is dropped; and in the title story, a Vietnamese refugee overtaken by a storm on the South China Sea feels as if she is “soaring through the air, the sky around [her] dark and inky and shifting.” As these brief descriptions indicate, the book’s seven stories are also diverse

For each of her books, Cole Swensen has typically chosen one subject—often from the world of art—around which the poems revolve, tracing the epistemology of the subject’s historical period all the while. In Such Rich Hour (2001), for instance, she contemplated at length the Limbourg brothers’ Très Riches du Duc de Berry, a fifteenth-century book of hours, which was in her broken syntax placed against the tenuous philosophical backdrop of the first Western systemizations of time. For The Glass Age (2007), the poet turned to Bonnard’s painterly depictions of windows, interweaving faintly expository prose regarding his canvases with subtle intimations

The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Andrew Sean Greer’s ornate, allegorical, and nearly universally praised second novel, proves a difficult act to follow, though The Story of a Marriage makes a sincere effort to do so. Like its predecessor, Greer’s third effort is an intelligent and generous expression of a deeply felt humanistic vision. But the ambitious tale, modeled in part on Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, is marred, significantly if not mortally, by the editorializing of a lugubrious narrator, strained emotional logic, and a flashback-laden narrative that is contrived if not manipulative.

Josh Barkan’s satiric first novel, Blind Speed, concerns Paul, the rather unethi­cal drummer for a failed rock band who is stuck between protracted adolescence and overdue adulthood. What might seem a clichéd coming-of-age story becomes, in Barkan’s hands, a bildungsroman with a twist, for Paul, thirty-five years old and foundering, hardly resembles the prototypical blossoming young man.

Usually, it’s pretty easy to ignore the glass wall that separates America’s rich and poor. Through an elaborate system of etiquette and authority, the division of the classes remains at once observed and discounted, with people of all stripes trudging through the same cities, even the same rooms, and the divergent logic of their lives going politely unremarked.

In his first year as coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, Phil Jackson made headlines by passing important books out to his star players: Shaquille O’Neal described the author of Ecce Homo as “ahead of his time” and “digital” and began referring to himself as “the black, basketball-playing Nietzsche.” Kobe Bryant, who viewed Jackson’s gesture as a personal affront, judged the book he received—Paul Beatty’s first novel, The White Boy Shuffle (1996)to be “bogus.”

“I think you are going to like Moshe,” reads the second sentence of Adam Thirlwell’s funny, inventive first novel, Politics (2003). “His girlfriend’s name was Nana. I think you will like her too.” And on the next page, “I like this couple.” Isn’t he overdoing the authorial intervention? Not a bit—this is a double bluff, and it manifestly works. “This may seem a little pushy to you,” the style says, “but I’m sure you’ll enjoy the book in spite of my pushiness—well, because of my pushiness, because my pushiness is so playful.” I say the double bluff works because you

Like the internal combustion engine and the Internet, the psychiatrist is one of those revolutionary inventions that no one embraces as an unalloyed gain for humanity. Psychiatry renders fatuous any attempt to imagine its absence from our world; even so, might not we be better off without it? Such a reflection is hardly the stuff of idle speculation for Charlie Weir, the therapist-protagonist of Patrick McGrath’s Trauma, who at one point voices the psychiatric “heresy” that “it is often by means of simple courage and a good woman that psychological problems are overcome, and without any help from people like

Love comes in for a thrashing in Joan Silber’s sixth book, The Size of the World, a collection of loosely connected stories. Women struggle under the curse of commitment: pining for an unrequited love, taking up with bad boys, compromising reluctantly, being paid for companionship. Most of the men are restless, emotionally dwarfed souls, skittish about settling down and forced by economic circumstance or post-traumatic lethargy to whittle down their notions of independence. When Silber does create a good guy, he gets jilted or dies.

Like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, whose nameless protagonist proclaims, “I yam what I yam,” and Amy Tan’s choreography of labored meals in pointed contrast to American fast food, Lara Vapnyar’s new story collection, Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, employs food—the buying, cooking, storing, eating, and ordering of it—to examine fractured identities.

A debut novel, set in a midsize metropolitan office, using a first-person-plural narrator to capture the collective consciousness of an amorphous workplace we: It’s difficult to avoid com­parisons between Ed Park’s Personal Days and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End. Both books attempt to strike a balance between humor and sympathy, between the indignities of midlevel white-collardom and the quiet nobility of showing up every day to do your job. Under the shared influence of Don DeLillo, both apply his sig­nature mixture of uneasy cross talk, misinfor­mation, and paranoia to a period of seemingly random corporate layoffs. And