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.

Arriving in the United States from India in 1975, Kashmiri author Agha Shahid Ali pursued both graduate degrees and his art. While quickly successful in the world of writing programs and academic presses, he explored in his poetry how readily expatriation could come to feel like exile. But as his collected poems, The Veiled Suite, make clear, he worked hard to find in such exile if not his true home, at least a safe house, as in book after book until his untimely death in 2001 he measured the distance between East and West.

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

The “Message from the Author” on the advance reading copy of Sag Harbor catches the book’s tone right off the bat. “I’ve always been a bit of a plodder, which is why I now present my Autobiographical Fourth Novel, as opposed to the standard Autobiographical First Novel,” writes the author of The Intuitionist (1998), a coiled, dank existential mystery story about a war between two schools of elevator inspectors; John Henry Days (2001), in which the steel-driver ballad rewrites itself and everyone it touches; and Apex Hides the Hurt (2006), a tense tale of a New York nomenclature consultant who

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.

A chess hustler, a snoop in wheelchair, a budding recluse who communes with weird fish, a pair of brothers fighting over whether they should buy a mountain, and a man who gets beaten up by a welterweight in a parking lot. The ensemble cast from a Bob Dylan song, circa 1964? No, just a partial lineup of the people we meet in Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, the short-story debut from Wells Tower.

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. .

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.