Word: knopf
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...novelist, and a very fine one, Patrick McGrath has specialized in the modern Gothic, books in which madmen of one kind or another work their wiles. But his superb and unwholesome new novel, Port Mungo (Knopf; 242 pages), is not about anything so simple as abnormal psychology. It's about the brutal impulses available to anyone, especially artists, who would let slip the loose restraints of civilization...
...turns out, Haruf wasn't done with the little town of Holt and its striving, melancholy folk. His new novel, Eventide (Knopf; 300 pages), picks up their stories about 18 months later and follows them through an eventful autumn, winter and spring. The old bachelor McPheron brothers, Harold and Raymond, are now contending with the departure of Victoria Roubideaux, the pregnant teenager who came to live with them in Plainsong and has moved with her toddler daughter to another town to start college. There's a new focus on the slow-witted Luther and Betty Wallace, whose grasp of fundamental...
When The Dew Breaker (Knopf; 244 pages), Edwidge Danticat's book of linked stories, begins, a young artist born in Brooklyn, N.Y.--Haitian, though she's never been to Haiti--learns from her father how he acquired the scar on his cheek he brought back from prison. He wasn't one of those receiving punishments, he tells his already unsettled daughter; he was one inflicting them. His sense of guilt is one reason he gave her the name "Ka," after the good angel of ancient Egyptian mythology. It's also why he gets her to read The Book...
What Shipler aims to do in The Working Poor: Invisible in America (Knopf; 319 pages) is to produce a picture of all of those dominoes at once, the multitude of obstacles that keep the working poor on the edge--and sometimes beyond the edge--of household-finance disaster. As the gap between the highest-and lowest-paid workers steadily worsens, he writes, "low wage employees have been testing the American doctrine that hard work cures poverty...
...Tyler is. The author of The Accidental Tourist is a quiet observer of the existential quagmire, the writer who returns again and again to the predicament of people who are trying not to rock the boat or, if they do, to set it back up quickly. The Amateur Marriage (Knopf; 306 pages) is another of those stories, though the wider world intrudes more prominently in this one than in most other Tyler novels, largely in the effect that war and social upheaval have on the life of an uneasily married couple...