With its Wild West tale of prostitutes, Indians, wagon trains, guns, silver mines, opium, and suicide, Missy, the debut novel by Scottish playwright Chris Hannan, is alternately dazzling in its historical verisimilitude and linguistic playfulness and frustrating—is it intended to entertain or to enlighten? Wrestling with this conundrum may be unavoidable for authors of any work that attempts to consider—or reconsider—the American West for what it really was: a land of lawlessness and cruelty fueled by alcohol, testosterone, and greed. Moreover, what Missy shows (and Hollywood westerns rarely

In Mac Wellman’s universe, a radish can be used as an eye, a young girl can fall in love with a toucan, and some folks still use faxes. Best known for his experimental plays, Wellman has also published four volumes of poetry and three novels—works describing self-contained worlds that question our cultural preoccupations and assumptions. His latest book continues this practice: A Chronicle of the Madness of Small Worlds is a collection of short stories—or, as the author would have it, an interconnected series of planetoids—that, while comically inventive, rings with the sound of our contemporary

It’s easy to forget that American poetry was not always as friendly to the middle class as it is today. In the first half of the last century, a generation of poets who grew up reading Flaubert accepted “Épater le bourgeois as the Second Commandment of their art, just after Pound’s “Make it new.” The postwar economic boom changed everything, of course. Flaubert’s motto continued to animate some, but poets like Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass, and James McMichael proved that the life of the middle class could truly be a subject (and not merely a target) of real art.

Campbell McGrath’s Seven Notebooks

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.