“Thank you for asking me to submit to your magazine, / Dead Fluffy Coyote, / but I haven’t been writing much poetry lately. / I’ve been rockin’. / Or, I should say, rockin’ again.” In the swaggering opening lines of The Virgin Formica, Sharon Mesmer lays out its central conceit: that poetry is the least of her concerns––she’s been livin’ and will continue to do so, regardless of what the academic peanut gallery has to say about it. Often flowing down the page in lanky, listlike columns, her profane and funny poems venerate the vernacular and the blue-collar through rhapsodizing

Each of Stacey D’Erasmo’s three psychologically intricate novels begins with a crisis. In Tea, her 2000 debut, an eight-year-old girl is asked to bring a cup of tea to her mother, who is taking a bath; when the next section opens, we come to understand that the woman has since committed suicide. In A Seahorse Year (2004), a San Francisco couple cope with the disappearance of their teenage son, who has ominously left a knife stuck into the floorboards of his room; they soon learn that he is schizophrenic. Now, in The Sky Below, D’Erasmo starts with a trauma that

In November 2007, the National Endowment for the Arts issued a report packed with data revealing that the “habit of regular reading” was on the decline. In the same report, evidence was marshaled to show “how powerfully reading transforms the lives of individuals.” These days, we seem more invested than ever in the idea that words on the page can change you and that stories might produce power surges lasting a lifetime. Testimonials abound in volumes with titles ranging from A Passion for Books and The Book That Changed My Life to Bound to Please and Leave Me Alone, I’m

Joe Ashby Porter has a knack for finding life’s small moments, gilding them with flights of fancy, then letting them drift away. Sometimes he writes viscerally, as in this description of a body’s decomposition: “[Grandpa] Guo dwindles to a specimen cicada husk boxed and buried near Wanda below the frost line.” And sometimes he writes opaquely, as when old lovers reconsider each other: “Resumption should be a bodily karaoke, ready (even still) to be carried away, if just as happy with the slow and steady, old sobriquets welling up, thigh across thigh, tasting.” All Aboard, Porter’s fourth volume of stories,

Laney Brooks is a woman in agony, suffering from an undefined malady that makes standard housewife ennui—boredom from carpooling or picking up dry cleaning—look like a picnic. Laney’s despair, ably depicted by Amy Koppelman in her affecting second novel, I Smile Back, is rooted in childhood. Specifically, it is tied to the abandonment of Laney’s family by her father and to her abiding sense of worthlessness. Laney’s adulthood has been marked by success (husband and beloved children, SUV, nice house in northern New Jersey) as well as self-destruction (affairs, drugs, alcohol abuse). And her darker impulses lead to a halfhearted

Anyone who saw the 2005 film Old Joy, which is based on the lead story in Livability, will immediately understand what I mean when I say that Jon Raymond is a master at re-creating those feelings of unease and confusion that arise when relationships are at their most precarious. Most of the nine poignantly restrained stories in this collection feature anxious characters who test the limits of social and personal responsibility, subjecting themselves to isolation and ruin.

Even then, it was obvious she was a genius,” said Miss Katherine Scott, Flannery O’Connor’s freshman-composition teacher, speaking to a reporter many years later about her most famous student—“warped, but a genius all the same.” The teacher no doubt focused on the warped part when the seventeen-year-old Catholic girl with the spectacles and the searing wit took her writing class at Milledgeville’s Georgia State College for Women in the summer of 1942; and it was the warped part she noticed some ten years later, when she read O’Connor’s first book, Wise Blood, and flung it across the room. “I thought

In the title story of Antonya Nelson’s latest collection, Nothing Right, a divorced mother asks her teenage son—who’d once loved to be read to and now balks at writing a paper on Macbeth—why he dislikes literature. “It’s not real,” he says. “Just a bunch of imaginary crap.” Sure, you could give the kid an argument about Shakespeare, and so could the mother if she, like a lot of Nelson’s characters, weren’t worn down by parenthood. She recognizes, as he does not, that something like the story of “a weak king and his bitchy wife” has recently played out “in his