BOOk 'em

All the Time in the World

By E.L. Doctorow

How real is real? In six new and six previously published short stories, acclaimed novelist E.L. Doctorow ( Ragtime, Billy Bathgate ) resolutely strands his characters in unfriendly physical landscapes that illustrate even more dissonant realities. A minimalist master, the author wastes no words drawing worlds spanning from the pre-industrial Bronx to the lonely plains of the rural Midwest. A traditional narrative draws the reader in with leadoff tale "Wakefield," about a family man who impulsively bails out of humdrum responsibility to live in his attic garage, obsessively watching his family's life progress without him. Subsequent stories mine personal relationships for inherent tension: a husband and wife upended by a nomad who claims he used to live in their home, a dishwasher who marries his boss's immigrant cousin for money. Though each rotates on a fixed point, Doctorow challenges the reader with perplexing endings, as in "Heist," the 1968 story that grew into his 2000 novel City of God. Though separated by decades, distance and even genre, these protagonists are distinctly alone, left to exercise their agency on the world: either divorced from consequence ("A House on the Plains") or battered by terrifying retribution disproportionate to their actions ("Jolene: A Life"). Chillingly realistic, the impact of the collection is foreshadowed by Wakefield, arriving home to a power outage: "There's a kind of Doppler effect in the mind, and you think that these disconnects are the trajectory of a collapsing civilization." Random House, 304 pp., $26, March 22.

—Felicia D'Ambrosio

The Tragedy of Arthur

By Arthur Phillips

This slick, crafty little book consists of two unequal parts: the titular, fake Shakespeare play about the medieval British king (though well-removed from the familiar Arthurian legends), and a 250-page "introduction" in the form of a fake memoir by a writer named Arthur Phillips, who believes the play to be a hoax perpetrated by his father, despite expert consensus on its authenticity. This legitimately imaginative conceit and structure suggest some obvious opportunities for multilayer truth-and-fiction games — probably wisely, the book doesn't try too hard to pass itself off as genuine, but it's executed cleverly enough that some readers will probably be duped nonetheless. Aptly, the lengthier first portion wrangles extensively, a little exhaustively, with themes of reality, artifice and duplication: The novelist-narrator's Bard-loving father is an inveterate fabulist and professional forger; his twin sister (!) is an actress, and so on. There's also a pointed, albeit thoughtful, skewering of the literary establishment (the "Shakespeare-industrial complex"), some predictably heavy-handed psychologizing (serious daddy issues) wrapped up in the decently compelling family drama, and some rather obnoxiously glib hand-wringing about the inherently manipulative nature of memoir writing. All well and good (although memoiristic pastiche feels like a too-easy target), but I'd endorse the advice of the brief editorial preface (also, of course, fake) to skip ahead to the play itself. The pentameter feels a little pat, but otherwise Phillips' ersatz Bard is remarkably convincing, and, more importantly, a lot of fun: It's easily good enough to live up to its lengthy, elaborate setup, and it might even be better off without it. Random House, 384 pp., $26, April 19.

—K. Ross Hoffman

Queer (In)Justice

By Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie and Kay Whitlock

Freddie Mason, a 31-year-old black nurse's assistant with no criminal record, was arrested after a verbal altercation with his landlord. He was anally raped by a Chicago police officer with a club covered in detergent. Jeremy Burke, a white transgendered man, was beaten and strip-searched after being arrested by several female officers in San Francisco. He was jailed in the nude, then forced to wear a dress and expose his genitalia to the cops. These are just two cases spotlighted in Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States, which re-evaluates the penal system through a lavender lens. While sobering and academic, the book sheds light on serious flaws in the legal system, as well as homophobia and bigotry among many in law enforcement. It also delves into the impact of queer archetypes that have come to shape these misinformed perceptions. In the case of Bernina Mata, a Latina lesbian accused of murdering a white heterosexual man, the authors say race and sexuality played a significant role in her trial when the state's attorney suggested that the motive to commit the crime stemmed from Mata being a "hard-core lesbian." Her sexuality, the prosecution claimed, caused her to kill. Despite any evidence, she was found guilty and is now serving a life sentence. So the lingering question is this: If LGBT individuals can't even be guaranteed a fair trial, is true equality possible? Beacon, 216 pp., $27.95, Feb. 15.

—Natalie Hope McDonald

Started Early, Took My Dog

By Kate Atkinson

Missing children, lost souls, repressed trespasses and empty lives are the markers of a Kate Atkinson novel. Started Early, Took My Dog fits tidily into her collection of engaging, addictive crime novels. Returning Atkinson hero Jackson Brodie, sporting a new appreciation for poetry and England's pastoral splendor, is on the hunt for an adopted woman's missing mother; lonely retired copper Tracy Waterhouse finds herself on the run from her first case and her empty life with a stolen child in tow; and septuagenarian actress Tilly shuttles between the present and the past, battling the rapid onset of dementia and struggling to maintain her morphing identity. Their stories weave in and out of each others' orbits, with Brodie crashing into Waterhouse as she dashes from the past into an unexpected future, and with Tilly's memories teasing at the past, losing touch with the now, and witnessing what's to come. While the characters are busy running to and from what was and what will be, stories of missing, murdered and abused women peek through, connecting Atkinson's primary characters to a host of other players. It's no surprise that, in a novel this sprawling, a stitch or two gets dropped — while one woman's murder and one child's abduction are solved, another murder and abduction are left unresolved. This uncertainty, though, brings the story satisfyingly full-circle, tying up certain threads while leaving new ones to dangle. Reagan Arthur, 384 pp., $24.99, March 21.

—Char Vandermeer

Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella

By Neil Lanctot

The life story of Baseball Hall of Famer Roy Campanella has been told before in the inspirational memoir It's Good to Be Alive. West Chester's Neil Lanctot adopts a more nuanced approach in his new biography of the Nicetown native, whose catching career with the Brooklyn Dodgers ended after being paralyzed in a 1958 car accident. Lanctot describes Campanella's anomalous childhood as the son of an Italian-American father and African-American mother in 1930s Philadelphia: "In the eyes of American society, it was [his mother's] heritage that determined Roy's racial identity." And during Campanella's early career, Lanctot notes that sportswriters ignorantly spelled his last name "Confenello," "Campanello" and "Cantenella." A 15-year-old Campanella entered the Negro Leagues in 1937, expecting his interracial heritage might help him break the color barrier. Lanctot does not shy away from the less palatable aspects of Campanella's life, including two early, unhappy marriages (divorcing wife number two shortly after the car crash) and a rocky relationship with Dodger teammate Jackie Robinson. But Lanctot does illustrate how Campanella came to grips with his disability and how, in his final years, counseled another Italian-American catcher from Philly who starred for the Dodgers — Mike Piazza. Simon & Schuster, 560 pp., $28, March 8.

—Andrew Milner

The Strange Case of Edward Gorey

By Alexander Theroux

"For some reason my mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible," Alexander Theroux quotes his longtime friend Edward Gorey as explaining, "because that's what the world is like." Morbidly droll, bleakly comic, as overwrought as an absinthe swoon and as tart as a poisoned madeleine, Gorey's acid little tomes are responsible for turning many a child's scheming mind to the shadows by their resemblance to kiddie books in all but content. Inside those gorgeously illustrated pages were all manner of murder, evil and catastrophe, all told with elusive hints and Edwardian flourishes. Such a purveyor of the ominous suggestion and the mysterious glance would be ill-served by conventional biography, which Theroux has no intention of providing in this slim volume, albeit expanded to more than double the size of his original essay, published shortly after Gorey's death in 2000. While a few facts do crop up — we learn when the elaborately bearded author/illustrator was born, when he died, a bit about his early life — this is more a memoir of Theroux's friendship with Gorey than a life of its subject. Theroux works to characterize and contextualize, cataloging Gorey's often surprising loves (the skull collection makes sense, but the love of soap operas? OK, maybe that makes a kind of sense, as well ...) and indulging in gossip and speculation, seemingly a return visit to a fondly missed, archly individual acquaintance. Fantagraphics, 168 pp., $19.99, Feb. 14.

—Shaun Brady

Townie

By Andre Dubus III

In most towns, there's no shortage of muscle-dense young men who like to fight. It's not often that anyone considers that maybe they need to fight. That need gnawed at Andre Dubus III for most of his life, which he describes in vivid, poignant, profoundly self-reflective language in his memoir, Townie. Growing up disdainfully labeled as the titular stereotype in a derelict Massachusetts town, Dubus used iron, a punching bag and discipline to transform himself from scrawny prey into hulking family guardian. He wanted to physically smash through the "membrane" — the invisible barrier that separated every human from one another. He graphically describes fighting, the exercise that made him feel most like himself — that is, until the day he discovered that writing could produce the same effect. This brutally honest account of going from directionless slacker to passionate author is humble, almost sheepish — Dubus is just an everyday man who simply spent much of his life in trouble. W.W. Norton, 400 pp., $25.95, Feb. 28.

—Kala Jamison

The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady

By Elizabeth Stuckey-French

The premise here sounds bleak: Seventy-seven-year-old Marylou moves to Tallahassee to kill the doctor who, in 1953, fed her a radioactive cocktail in a secret government study which caused her daughter's fatal cancer. The physician in question, a now-ailing Dr. Spriggs, lives with his daughter Caroline's dysfunctional family: hurricane-watcher Vic, horny tween Suzi, and her two older siblings, Ava and Otis, who both have Asberger's. As Marylou ingratiates herself into their lives, she may intend malice but ends up forcing introspection instead. Elizabeth Stuckey-French doesn't tiptoe around Ava and Otis' conditions, calling them on their tendencies to "get Asbergery" with humor and sensitivity. Likewise, her insights into Caroline and Vic's midlife crises, Spriggs' Alzheimer's and Marylou's age-related eccentricities (she calls herself "Nancy Archer," the titular character in the B-movie Attack of the 50 Foot Woman ) show nuance and empathy. It's easy to feel cheated by the novel's tidy ending — but perhaps the disappointment comes from having to say goodbye to new friends. Doubleday, 333 pp., $25.95, Feb. 8.

—Mark Cofta

The Troubled Man

By Henning Mankell

As far as the rumpled crime novel goes, Sweden's Henning Mankell has quite the way with it — at least when it comes to his recurring protagonist, Kurt Wallander. Deeply forensic and disturbed in every sense, Wallander is a sort of moralist who wishes the planet ill while solving its most horrendous murders. Yet now Wallander must contend with a few ills of his own — guilt after having killed the wrong man, the onset of Alzheimer's, disillusionment with the world and his work within it. The Dogs of Riga, The Man Who Smiled and One Step Behind are but a few of Mankell's Wallander works in which the complications of emotional and physical deterioration never let up. The Troubled Man is no different, save for the fact that his emotions run harder and higher. In the end, the whole tangle leads back to the Cold War and a tizzy of old-world intrigue, a rarity in Mankell's lean, modern writing and a perfect finale (perhaps) to the series. Knopf, 384 pp., $26.95, March 29.

—A.D. Amorosi

You Think That's Bad

By Jim Shepard

"I'm really interested in how complicated our self-presentation can be: the way it can knit together self-indictment and self-exoneration so weirdly and completely," novelist and short-story master Jim Shepard told the online literary magazine Memorious in 2008. No surprise, then, that of the 11 stories that comprise his 10th book of fiction, You Think That's Bad, nine are first-person narratives. Set in locales ranging from a grotesquely homicidal manor in 15th-century France to the sound stage of the original Godzilla film (Shepard is an obsessive study, often spending months researching a single tale), these stories take self-indictment and self-exoneration to harrowing new levels. His characters pursue extremes — avalanche research in the Swiss Alps, a World War II military campaign in the rotting heat of New Guinea, water management in a warmer, near-future Netherlands — the details of which Shepard renders with awe-inspiring precision. Disaster looms for these people, and in the meantime, their personal relationships are no more workable, beset as they are with passivity, desire and other congenital human weaknesses. By layering narratives this way, Shepard explores the limits of what humans can do in the world — scientifically, institutionally, emotionally — as well as the often-tragic consequences of our failure to acknowledge those limits. "We've learned more than any who've come before us what to expect," the avalanche researcher laments, "and it will do us no more good than if we'd learned nothing at all." Knopf, 268 pp., $24.95, March 25.

—Katherine Hill

Nat Tate: An American Artist

By William Boyd

Back in 1998, if you'd ordered a copy of Nat Tate, you'd have been in for a big surprise. This portrait of an artist from the 1950s — a contemporary of Frank O'Hara and Willem DeKooning — threw readers for a loop. A slim biographical monograph of an artist no one'd ever heard of? It was like Ann Beattie's book about Alex Katz. Turns out, the whole thing was a hoax. There is no Nat Tate. Even David Bowie and Gore Vidal, the book's endorsers, were in on the joke. An odd 13 years later, Nat Tate is available again, and it's pretty convincing. The details about the 1950s American art movement and Tate's technique of erasing and repainting are as painstakingly researched as anything Boyd has written. What's more, the many references by and about Logan Mountstuart, the protagonist of Boyd's subsequent novel, Any Human Heart, become fun in-jokes. At 72 pages, Nat Tate may be a mere doodle in Boyd's canon, but at least Banksy would appreciate it. Bloomsbury, 72 pp., $22, April 26.

–Gary M. Kramer

The Information

By James Gleick

With his 1987 debut, Chaos, James Gleick proved he could make technical ideas accessible to a wide audience. The book was a surprise best-seller and, more memorably, introduced the term "butterfly effect" into the pop-culture lexicon. Though his focus has shifted from science to information technology, Gleick hasn't lost his touch. The Information opens with a description of African talking drums, which colonizing Europeans couldn't wrap their heads around. But, as Gleick lays out, there's a crucial structural linguistic difference between African and European languages, which explains how the drums work, why the drummers' language was so rife with bizarrely ornate syntax and, perhaps most importantly, how that syntax is the key to minimizing transmission errors. Gleick's book is a worthy complement to Charles Seife's terrific Decoding the Universe, a more analytical account of information technology. Gleick's latest is more historical, but nevertheless engaging and thought-provoking throughout. Pantheon, 544 pp., $28.95, March 1. James Gleick reads at the Free Library's Central Branch on March 1.

—Matthew Hotz

When the Killing's Done

By T.C. Boyle

Ecosystems have gone awry in the Channel Islands: Rats, feral pigs and sheep, all invasive populations, threaten the archipelago's unique biodiversity. But when you get down to the genetic makeup of T.C. Boyle's environmental drama, the "problem species" is undoubtedly the homo sapien. Boyle's novel stems from a divisive eco-conflict over the preservation of this California habitat. On the side of the National Park Service, tightly wound biologist Alma Boyd Takesue pursues the government project to kill off non-native species, while David LaJoy, a dreadlocked activist with anger-management issues, angles to thwart her efforts. Easy stereotypes fall away, though, when these characters' back stories emerge from the troubled surf. Boyle's serpentine plot, which offs quite a few characters without being gimmicky, disturbs the moral balance and leaves the reader to discern when, or if, the killing's done. Viking, 384 pp., $26.95, Feb. 22.

—Will Stone