Lack is everywhere in All the Living. Lack of rain, lack of cash, lack of other, less tangible things. From the first pages of C. E. Morgan’s gripping, sensual debut novel, the contemporary Kentucky countryside sprawls into view. Into this void—silent, spectral, and chalky with dust— comes Aloma, whose bereaved lover, Orren, has inherited the family tobacco farm. To Aloma’s wary eye, the place and its contents are qualified by absence, human and otherwise. A fan hangs “spinless, trailing its cobwebs like old hair, its spiders gone,” the farmhouse is “empty-spacious,” the displaced dirt from the gravel drive is “loath to

The opening lines of J. Robert Lennon’s fifth novel, Castle, describe a landscape of impenetrable wilderness, an image that comes to pervade the book. The narrator, a plainspoken man named Eric Loesch, has just returned to his hometown and purchased a large tract of undeveloped forest on the “far western edge of the county,” with only a dilapidated farmhouse at its edge. Loesch has almost no family and few friends and seems determined to avoid any connection to his old life in the area. “I tend to align myself,” he explains, “against the present cultural obsession with the past. .

Andrew Joron is a modern-day alchemist. He’s not interested in solipsistic self-enrichment; rather, he practices the art of transformation. Translator of Marxist-utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch’s Literary Essays (1998) and author of a study titled Neo-Surrealism; Or, The Sun at Night (2004) and the volume of essays and prose poems The Cry at Zero (2007), as well as a handful of poetry collections, including the remarkable Fathom (2003), Joron has always been a thinker in multiple genres. Though aligned with the revolutionary impulse behind Surrealism—the conjuring of paradox to expand the possible—he appreciates the movement’s aesthetic limitations and has somehow, miraculously,

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

If you’ve ever wondered what life in the kitchen of a grand old London hotel might be like, Monica Ali’s painstakingly detailed new novel, In the Kitchen, is the book for you. In describing the intricate hierarchy that prevails in the restaurant of the Imperial Hotel, the complex choreography it takes to pull off an evening’s dinner service, and the intensity of the personal interactions that underlie the professional ones, Ali reveals a dining establishment’s inner workings with a thoroughness that’s revelatory and disturbing. Do you really want to know what it takes to cater your evenings out?

Poet Laurie Sheck’s new hybrid work, A Monster’s Notes, raises more questions than it answers about the life and times of Mary Shelley, the fate of Shelley’s famous monster, and the act of literary creation. Depending on the reader’s interest in such multilayered questioning and in the Shelley-Imlay-Woollstonecraft-Godwin clan, one will either be fascinated by the book’s tangled intertextuality or left wondering whether it might not be best to return to the original texts and embark on some independent research.

In a particularly funny moment in Glen David Gold’s Sunnyside, set during World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II thumbs through a captured copy of Photoplay in his imperial water closet. His Highness learns that starlet Mary Miles Minter associates people she meets with pretty colors. Mary Pickford, for example, is marigold with a narrow stripe of violet. Why someone would pay twenty cents to learn this eludes him. Then he wonders, if he met her, “What color [would she] think he was?” Disgusted with himself, he tosses the magazine across the room. But, sheepishly, he retrieves it to finish the

There’s no making nice here, no way of easing into this writer’s sensibility. In The Girl with Brown Fur, Stacey Levine ignores lyricism as an evolutionary dead end. Life is fractious and dire, her prose style says; let fiction serve as razor and torch. It’s not that Levine isn’t funny or that she doesn’t forge phrases and sentences of throat-clutching beauty. It’s just that her effort to dissect humankind’s propensity for neuroses, fallacies, and other inanities requires measured drollery and surgical concision. And because her characters are pathologically ill at ease within their dysfunctional bodies and families, not to mention