After an epically shitty day, Jewell Jamieson unknowingly eats a magic-spiked meal and happens also to make a certain wish-and that's why she awakes the next morning to discover her beloved dog Oberon has been transformed into a beautiful naked man in her bed. Conflict ensues when Titania, the impulsive Queen of the Faeries, decides she wants Oberon for herself. Is Oberon simply a man who used to be a dog, or is he somehow something more? When Jewell discovers the answer, she will be faced with a devastating choice. Will she choose to save the man she's grown to love by giving him up, or will she honor his wishes and watch him die?

Did the Russians invent baseball? Is there a connection between Babe Ruth's cross-dressing and Gertrude Stein's secret mission to New York? What does history tell us about what lies beyond heaven?

From the American heartland to Hiroshima, to Paris, to shopping malls and caves with prehistoric art, Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic is a wild ride across generations and frontiers of the imagination.

To hear Paul Reverb tell it, he's fine.

Sure, he's been caught in a compromising situation by his window cleaner and failed to prevent daylight robbery, and yes, he no longer tells people he was born the day Sergeant Pepper was released, as, to his horror, people no longer know what a Sergeant Pepper is.

Fine.

But Paul isn't fine. He hates his job and he's not fond of his friends. He sits in his dead parents' flat surrounded by his carefully curated, reassuringly warm vinyl, not writing the novel he's not been writing for a decade. Paul is lonely to his bones and will likely stay that way until his dead body is found by his cleaner.

Will Paul Reverb ever find happiness? Will he even recognise it if he does? And who cares if a middle-aged man finds happiness anyway?

Fine is coarse. Fine is sad and sweet and crude and beautiful. Fine is scurrilously funny while making your bottom lip tremble. Fine is a rallying cry for growing old riotously, for not going gently and for not judging people by the state of their recycling bins.

British universities once enjoyed an enviable reputation. Then the political class introduced fees, and in came corporate fixers, accountants, branding experts, those who salivate before the market. Hardnosed managers cut posts and salaries: why not put those bumbling professors on zero-hour contracts and get them to do a vast amount of unpaid work?

Now in 2035 at the University of Bliss in the south of England, the dead hand of bureaucracy smothers all intellectual endeavour. An unashamedly corporate ideology holds sway, thinly veiled by ubiquitous rainbow washing and tokenistic gestures towards moral and spiritual values, the environment, and mental wellbeing. Cue for poets Tristan Black and Harry Blink and charming if duplicitous post-structuralist Humph Lacan to fight back. But is it too late to save the university?

The University of Bliss is a spoof, a satire, a cri de coeur-Evelyn Waugh on acid. And of course, any similarity to actual persons, living, dead, or merely soulless, is purely coincidental.

Ina adores Babette and visits her cousin regularly in whichever facility Babette currently resides. She trusts Babette's take on all things and has since childhood (orphans cannot afford to be squeamish), but on Tuesday's visit, to her grave detriment, Ina fails to follow Babette's advice when an incident throws all in chaos.

(I told you to hide, cousin, Babette said sorrowfully...)

A one-way Alice in Wonderland, Ina now lives in Babette's world of lockdowns, barred windows, displaced ducks, mashed potatoes, plays told as stories and stories told as plays, perpetual cleaning, howls in the night and far too many windows.

Staying sane isn't as simple as it seems.

Photo: to do with light. Phyto: plants and flowers. Proto: the first, the original. Nitro: it blows up.

From Troy to Hiroshima, Crimea to the nuclear Nevada desert, we make our tracks over the war-scratched globe, and when we reach a ruin or a destination we read the markings, record them using various forms of photography. Later-or much, much later-someone else in turn will try to understand our silvery traces. These are the threads that Melissa McCarthy follows, unpicks, weaves again into a nexus of light and time: the mirrored silver cells of a shark's eyeball, sunlight glinting off the foam and sea wrack of the Aegean on flower with corpses, the silver salts of photographic paper, silver grave-treasures at Ur.

Like an archaeologist in her own strange literary landscape, McCarthy cuts through layers of history and technology to realign the dead and their images. She examines both what can be photographed and what remains always just beyond the frame, and photography itself. It's a practice involving chemicals and the action of light. But it's also an organising principle for literature and beyond: there are marks made-by us, on us-that we can't yet fully see or understand, though they push on through to the surface, always re-blooming.

An immaculate conception triggers an armed response. A mother chases away her son's imaginary friend, only to lament her absence. A new hire, visited by his company's wellness consultant, feels his sanity unraveling. A Norwich terrier recounts three generations of family trauma, unaware that he is on the way to be put down.

The thirteen stories of this follow-up to Breath Like the Wind at Dawn, Jacobsen's astonishing debut (Alastair Mabbott, The Herald), unfold across an array of settings and times, shifting fluidly between registers and vernaculars to explore loss in its myriad forms and along the way unearthing empathy for characters who range from endearing to indefensible.

Air is a graffiti artist and self-described street hermit who spends his nights in urban encampments and days in public libraries, reading up on physics and ancient philosophy, all while scribbling his cryptic criticisms of society across every surface he passes. When his only friend dies of an overdose, setting off a frantic search for meaning, Air must choose between confronting his past or joining Anachron, a mysterious underground militia that has declared war not just on the government, but on time itself.

Told in restless, mind-bending fragments that blend influences as various as Albert Einstein with Zhuangzi, The Epic of Gilgamesh with Hesiod, and quantum mechanics with The Wizard of Oz, The Only Wolf Is Time is a one-of-a-kind lyric noir.

Tabitha is a lonely fifty-year-old biographer who, in order to restore her self-respect and pay her rent, attempts to write two biographies simultaneously: one about an actor so famous his face is on the side of buses, and the other about a popular writer of children's books recently outed as an author of erotic fiction. Is Tabitha ready to deal with interviewing an actor so handsome and charismatic she thinks he should be bottled and sprayed on belligerent people as a form of crowd control? Can she form a genuine friendship with a cult novelist who pressures her to compromise her values? While facing these and other challenges, Tabitha is bedeviled by memories of her long-ago divorce and the terrible wedding when, accidently bumped on a balcony, she shot off into the shrubbery. Is it true, she wonders, that there's probably a dead body beneath the floating rot of any marriage? When surrounded by pretentious beautiful people does it help to imagine their intestines are full of worms? Are champagne bubbles the devil's air pockets? Is it ever too late to change your life-from the bottom up?

In the twilight of life, a black ribbon emerges from a frame and coils itself inside the mind of one of the great French chroniclers of the internal. Across the world, a young girl stares at an image in a book: a woman, naked but for slippers, jewels, and the same ribbon which so captivates the writer. At opposite poles of experience, one follows the ribbon as it winds its way round longings, regrets, and contemplations; the other, at the beginning of development and yet to discover the world, traces the ribbon with a finger, not realising how it will imprint itself upon her.

Years later, the girl-now woman-encounters the ribbon face to face and on the page. Manet's Olympia and the words of Michel Leiris come together, and an imaginary conversation ensues. It will be a collision and collaboration of sensorial memories and observations on everything from desire and illness to writing and grief. These frames are used to examine both interlocutors; simultaneously, a frame of another sort is removed from Olympia and her artistic kin. Everything from her flowers, Louise Bourgeois's Sainte Sébastienne, and Francis Bacon's Henrietta Moraes are reimagined and given new regard.

Songs for Olympia, written in the form of a response to Michel Leiris's The Ribbon at Olympia's Throat, itself a highly personal response to Manet's painting, is an ode to the both the ribbon and the memory: what leads us to constantly rediscover ourselves and a world so easily assumed as viewed through a single frame.

Dawn Raffel's Boundless as the Sky is a book of the invisible histories that repose beneath the cities we inhabit, and the worlds we try to build out of words. The first of its two parts, stories of real and invented cities, some ancient, some dystopian, is a response to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. The second part comes together into one narrative, taking place in a single city-Chicago-on a single day in 1933. It is based closely on a true event, the arrival of a roaring armada of goodwill in the form of twenty-four seaplanes flown in a display of fascist power by Mussolini's wingman Italo Balbo to Chicago's Century of Progress World's Fair. The 7000-mile flight from Rome to Chicago was lauded by both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Hitler, at a time when aviation made banner headlines across the US, and news of the Nazis was often in a side column. The novella follows a few of the many thousands of Chicagoans there to witness the planes' arrival. These two panels of Raffel's poetic diptych call out to each other with a mysterious and disquieting harmony, and from history and fantasy to the dangers and dark realities of the current moment with startling insight and urgency.

Thirteen tall tales about the role facial hair has played in athletics and competition over the years, Sporting Moustaches puts the ache in moustache. Whiskers are wrapped around sticks, bats, clubs, paddles, chess pieces, and shotglasses, woven into ropes, nets, arrow strings, and even other whiskers. The stories touch on the idea of the playoff beard, superstitions, Movember, The Cleveland Curse, mid-20th century American values eschewing all but the clean shaven, and how in the 1978 Chess World Championship the opponents accused each other of using psychic powers. There are of course more than a few allusions to Burt Reynolds. Packed with puns and pop culture references galore, Sporting Moustaches is a tribute to those who kept their head in the game.

These powerful essays share critical moments of a writer's life: scenes from sixty years of passionate married love; suicides faced and suicide contemplated; trauma at the DMV; a night lost searching for a harpsichord in the mountains of Florence, Italy; the tale of a beloved cousin whose plane is shot down by Japanese Zeros; and a precious friendship between two women writers derailed by the poisons of religion and politics. In the titular essay (included in Best American Essays 2023) a food bank, assuaging the pandemic's terrors with gifts of food and prayers, becomes a portal for intimate confidences entrusted to us by a voice of unspoiled authenticity and perennial vigor.

These linked essays of personal and cultural critique include meditations on home and childhood, love and sex, art and literature, parenting and self-destruction, on the city and on death. Walton constantly slips through and between memory's tenuous folds: that never happened, exactly, but it's certainly not a lie. Witty, candid, defying category, dogma, and expectation, Unsavory Thoughts is a bold self-portrait in an inscrutable landscape: lyric, profound, tragic, hilarious, absurd, insightful, teasing, searing, sincere. This is the world we live in-real or otherwise.

Every Bloomsday, six male writer reader drinker friends gather at a bar to talk about life and literature and to celebrate the idea of the masterpiece more than the masterpiece itself. All are frustrated to the point of desperation. But this Bloomsday will prove different: one of the most celebrated younger writers in the world, with the power to potentially unlock their careers, is expected to join them.

Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel is about ambition, creation, delusion, success, failure, submission, acceptance, rejection, idiocy, anger, idealism, persistence, and the excessive consumption of exceptional beer. It's also about walking and reading, the gestation of literary and literal offspring, and the joys and sorrows of writing with intent to publish.

This politically pornographic tale of the collapse of the American republic is an outrageously over-the-top reworking of a seventeenth-century Chinese account of a despicable family, transplanted into contemporary and near-future Baltimore. It narrates the descent into corruption of an elite East Coast family following the demise of its naive paterfamilias. As both plot and family unravel, examples of social malaise such as illiterate texting and technocratic feudalism proliferate, until familial and political rottenness merge together, and America is lost.

Zeke Borshellac is the story of the quest of a man who came from nothing to find meaning and fulfillment delivering succor to folks hit by hard times, though he often seems to be joined willy-nilly with forces producing much the opposite effect. Rocked by deceptions and disappointments, Zeke remains steadfast in his belief that there is something within him that has to come out, and that notion is the lodestar guiding him to his destiny as a grassroots folk hero uniting the downtrodden and oppressed.

Set in a cracked skew of time that smacks of the 19th century but exists unto itself, a lost dark world that can be suspenseful, dreamlike, and demented, Zeke Borshellac is a picaresque novel in the equally untimely grand tradition of Cervantes' Don Quixote, Fielding's Tom Jones and Melville's Redburn-a side-splitting comic masterpiece, a stylistic tour de force, and a deeply felt exploration of the relationship of individual aspiration to political action.

Fiction. Once upon a time that doesn't make a blind bit of sense, in a place that seems awfully familiar but definitely doesn't exist, Willem Seiler's obsession with measuring his world--with wrapping it up in his beloved string to keep the madness out--wreaks havoc on the Wakeling family. Noranbole Wakeling, living in the scrub and toil of the pantry and in the shadow of her much wooed and cosseted sister, is worshipped by the madman Seiler but overlooked by everyone else. As lives are lost to Seiler's vanity, she spots her chance to break free of the fetters that tie her to Tiny Village, and bolts. But some cords are never really cut. In her absence, the unravelling of the world she has escaped is complete, and another madness--her mother's--reaches out to entangle her newfound Big City freedom. The unpicked quilt-work of a life in ruins threatens to ruin her own, and it will be up to Noranbole to stitch it all together.

Dark and funny in equal measure, LAKE OF URINE is a sui generis romp through every fairy-tale convention and literary trope you can think of, including the wicked stepmother, the fairy godmother, Pinocchio, an enchanted penis, the goose that laid the golden egg, binary code, marmalade art and alcoholic meat snacks you can drink. It is also a merciless takedown of self and self-importance, satirizing a society that exalts the inane, drowns out the sane and eschews the divine for the profane, and a lament for the dreadful weight of our own origins, for the heartbreaking impossibility of absolute reinvention, and the heartening tug of the ties that bind us.

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Humor. Music. Of all of Raymond Smullyan's many books, A MIXED BAG: JOKES, PUZZLES, RIDDLES AND MEMORABILIA perhaps best captures the timeless delight of the casual conversation of this American polymath. A seamless continuum of jokes, stories, puzzles, and reflections, caught in an deliciously unpremeditated arc that nonetheless is remarkably cohesive, it is sparkling and charming proof that cheerfulness need not be incompatible with intelligence, nor pleasure with wisdom.

After finishing a graduate degree, poet Steven Breyak left Boston for what was supposed to be a year abroad. After seventeen years in Osaka, Japan, he returned to the US with a wife and two children. This collection, in part, captures this chance transition.