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

Paul Leppin was one of the most flamboyant, charismatic figures of Jung-Prag, Prague’s German-speaking literary coterie at the beginning of the twentieth century. Even by the standards of a movement that glorified decadence, his fiction is excessive. Swarming with prostitutes, anarchists, extortionists, infanticides, child molesters, and exhibitionists, it delves into the deepest layers of depravity and moral and sexual humiliation. Leppin, immediately recognizable in his large hats and loud ties, captivated listeners, among them Max Brod and Franz Kafka, with readings from his fiction and poetry at the Café Arco. Unfortunately, however, he could not tear himself away from Prague.

In Yalo, published in Arabic in 2002, Elias Khoury combs the world of an imprisoned rapist during the violent forced con­fession of his crimes and of “the story of his life.” Yalo is a young man from Beirut’s Syriac Quarter who left the area as a teenager when the civil war escalated in 1976. He fought, then emigrated to France, where eventually, holding a Kalashnikov, he attacked lovers in parked cars at night. He returned to Lebanon and continued robbing and raping. The novel opens as he is being tortured, and this scene is the core around which Khoury builds

In her splendid debut novel, Blood Kin, Ceridwen Dovey offers a tale about the revolutionary overthrow of a dictatorship in an unnamed country. The exchange of power she describes isn’t specific to the totalitarian governments of, say, Latin America or Africa, nor is it a critique of the sad play of current US international affairs. The novel isn’t, in fact, a commentary on our times, despite its setting in the present or the recent past. Instead, Dovey’s concern is more elemental: Blood Kin is a story about power, political and personal, and its dangerous ineffability.

In the last lines of Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s poem “The Cherry Tree’s Journey,” the mother asks, “Where will we tie up the cherry tree’s shadow / now that we have neither donkey nor cherry tree?” The question sets the tone for the poems that follow, for Nettles, the Lebanese poet’s latest collection, is engaged in convoluted negotiations between lost things tethered rather tenuously together, primarily in the realms of the spoken and the unspoken.

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.

For Newell Ewing, a twelve-year-old malcontent growing up in a middle-class Las Vegas subdivision, the Strip—“The neon. The halogen. The viscous liquid light”—is a bright abstraction, beads on the horizon as distant and unattainable as the moon. One Saturday evening, chaperoned by his older friend Kenny, Newell makes his first visit to the casinos. He never comes home. Charles Bock’s first novel, Beautiful Children, opens almost a year after the fateful August night Newell ran away.

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

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.