In 1968, Don Freeman wrote a children’s story about a department-store-dwelling toy bear named Corduroy, who wears green overalls missing a button and is finally taken home by a little girl undeterred by this damage. But what happened to Corduroy when he “grew up”? Was he added to a Death List, grabbed in the middle of the night by a wolf in a red pickup, and carted off to the woods for disposal? Such is the fate of doomed stuffed animals in Mollisan Town, the setting for the decidedly adult noir novel Amberville, Swedish writer Tim Davys’s delightful debut. Davys’s

Gary Indiana likes rummaging through the wreckage. He regularly signals as much: Recent essays were gathered last year in a collection titled Utopia’s Debris, and his 2003 novel, Do Everything in the Dark, opens with a section called “The Debris Field.” Later in that book, he coins an aperçu that encapsulates an entire philosophy: “Wherever people attempt life, debris piles up.” The emphasis on detritus suggests that everyone and everything has washed up as flotsam and jetsam on history’s far shore; vital unities are denied us, and we can only gaze back at those of the past. At best, “by

At a moment in history when God is said to participate in world politics, the pungent ode to nature De rerum natura, composed by the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus, can provide a dose of sanity. What the atomist Epicurus called ataraxia—the tranquility of mind achieved when one is freed from the fear of occult controllers—Lucretius transformed into a prophetic materialism. His lyric treatise, published in the first century bce, predicts everything from atomic physics to the existence of DNA and casts it all in melodious hexameters.

There is very little under the sun one can tell a Moroccan about sex if, as is likely, he or she has been exposed to an uncensored edition of The Thousand Nights and One Night. The fabled collection is full of forced coupling and pimps, swords used for erotic purposes, “kisses, bitings, huggings, twistings, great strokes of the zabb, variations, first, second, and third positions, and the rest.” It’s not just a carnal cornucopia; sex is the great nexus for jealousy, longing, and love. Sex, in these tales, is about power.

Nikolai Hoffner is a man with more than a few skeletons tucked away in his closet. The tough, hard-drinking chief inspector of the Kriminalpolizei, Weimar Berlin’s legendary Kripo, has a pronounced tendency to get police work entangled with his private life. By the time we’re introduced to him in Jonathan Rabb’s Shadow and Light, the second novel in a trilogy set in Germany between the wars, his wife, Martha, has long been murdered, killed as a result of his sleuthing, and his older son, Sascha, who’s become caught up in the rise of fascism, is completely estranged from him. But

Unlike most bildungsromans—  especially of the road-story variety—Reif Larsen’s debut, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, features an upstart whose growth and burgeoning self-awareness are captured in an internal monologue, rather than sundry adventures on the trail. Not that our plucky hero, Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, twelve-year-old cartographer magnifique, doesn’t embroil himself in some shenanigans when he lights out from his family’s Montana ranch, jumps a freight train, and makes his way to the Smithsonian in Washington to claim the prestigious Baird award for the popular advancement of science.

To name your book In the United States of Africa, and to present readers with a vision of the world turned completely on its head, in which the urbane citizens of Rwanda, Nigeria, and the eastern Cape are given to fretting over a chronic glut of working-class immigrants from the war-torn and disease-ridden hamlets of Europe and North America, is to suggest a project barely containable in this volume’s hundred-odd pages. There’s too much history to reshape, too many explanations to offer.

Rae Armantrout is the most philosophical sort of poet, continually seeking in her collections to summon and surmise the contemporary character of subjective experience and, further, to test the limits of knowledge. Yet these meditations are often counterintuitive and sometimes downright absurd in their complexion, referencing cartoon characters (Wile E. Coyote and Rainbow Frog), miming the standardized phrases of tabloid headlines and business transactions (“These temporary credits / will no longer be reflected / in your next billing period”), and rehearsing bits of dialogue rooted only in the vapid grammars of cultural cliché (“I think our incentives / are sexy