Imagine trotting through life as a dog. After a long day tracking fetid smells, barking at alarming sounds, and feverishly scratching fleas, you slouch into the evening with a bowl of dried food. Sound fun? Well, this is the easy life when compared to the trials of Mr. Bones, the furry, faithful protagonist of Paul Auster’s latest, Timbuktu.

As far as dogs go, Mr. Bones stands tails above your average canine. First of all, he understands English. He gets more than the babble-babble-Mr.-Bones-babble-babble that most dogs understand. This four-legged hero scores high when it comes to verbal comprehension, making him the perfect companion for the non-stop chatterbox that is his master, Willy Christmas. A casualty of the 1960s, Willy partied heavily with psychedelic pharmaceuticals and paid a steep psychological price. The bill for his sanity arrived late one night during his furlough from rehab. After bonding with a hallucination of Santa Claus transmitted to him through his TV, Willy’s life purpose became the preaching of the good word of St. Nick to anyone within earshot. As a traveling companion and an open set of ears, Mr. Bones lives a life as directionless as the endless rants of his lunatic companion. Yet for all the shortcomings of hanging out with a wacko who talks continually about the ills of society and the divine grace of Santa, the two find happiness. A life on the streets is also a life of adventure. Willy is full of insane schemes, and, like Jim to a restless Huck Finn, Mr. Bones gets drawn into all sorts of mischievous plans.

So when Willy pronounces sadly that his days on this earth are numbered, it is with a heavy heart that Mr. Bones heads for parts unknown in search of a new master. In this quest for an appropriate soul mate, the real trials for this luckless, albeit gifted, hound begin.

Paul Auster’s Timbuktu relates these adventures and much more. Taking life from a dog’s-eye view treats us to a better understanding of the cruelties of our urban environs. Willy and Mr. Bones help us see not only how colorful but also how difficult life on the streets can be. Timbuktu celebrates a strange pair, but does so with a nose for the joys of the wanderer as well as for the vicissitudes of the lives of the down-and-out.

Charles Wyrick plays with the band Stella.

Fans of Ralph Ellison’s classic novel Invisible Man have endured a 40-year wait for the master novelist’s follow-up work, Juneteenth, which Ellison worked on until his death in 1994. Originally the book was scheduled in 1967, but a fire destroyed the manuscript. When Ellison died, John F. Callahan, his literary executor, was left with the task of constructing enough material to fill three novels.

Because Ellison died without leaving a guide to the structure of the novel, Callahan used his instincts to patch together the fictional lives of two mythic characters, Reverend Alonzo Hickman and his adopted son, who later becomes U.

S. Senator Adam Sunraider, rising political star and white supremacist. Raised by blacks, Sunraider runs away from his religious upbringing to reinvent himself as a hustling filmmaker, then as a lawmaker hell-bent on the subjugation of African Americans.

The novel opens with Rev. Hickman arriving at the senator’s office to warn of a possible assassination attempt. However, the old black man is turned away by the senator’s secretary and security staff. Finally the minister goes to Congress to head off the assailant, but the shooting still occurs on the Senate floor, with Sunraider being seriously wounded. Ellison hits his stride in the hospital scenes where the Senator and the minister come together for a series of startling flashbacks of their lives many years earlier.

Ellison’s skill with language, cultural nuances, and pivotal social events emerges in this richly conceived and finely executed excerpt of what was to be a major historical saga examining the topics of God, paternal love, greed, politics, American racial dilemma, sin, and temptation.

Readers of earlier Ellison works will recognize the brilliant prose, surrealistic imagery, and insightful depictions of both major and minor characters. However, an awkwardness enters the work in the transitions between scenes and the pacing of the action. One wonders how much more powerful the work would have been if Ellison had lived to complete it.

Robert Fleming is a journalist in New York City.

In the summer of 1970, Thomas Mann Jr. (no relation to the writer of the same name) finds an infant in a basket on his front porch, with a note that reads: Eddie’s bastard. Though the book begins with an old-fashioned cliche, readers will be pleasantly surprised by the lively novel the first by author William Kowalski that follows. Eddie’s Bastard is the story of the upbringing of that infant, who Mann realizes is his grandson, the son of his son, Eddie, recently killed in Vietnam. He names the child William Amos Mann, or Billy, for short. Billy’s mother is unknown; Doubtless she had her reasons for leaving him, concludes Mann. More importantly, Mann has his own reason for keeping the baby Billy is the last of a small-town dynasty, the Manns of Mannsville, New York. I got stories to tell him, Tom tells Connor, the family doctor. He needs to know everything. Stories are nearly all that’s left now of the Mann clan, their numbers dwindled to two, and their fortune lost in an ill-advised ostrich-farm venture. The elder Mann lives hermit-like, mostly drunk, immersed in family lore. Occasionally the characters’ musings on what it means to be a Mann border on melodrama. However, as Billy grows up and ventures from the lonely house into the community, the novel explores identity in a larger sense how others see us, how we see ourselves, and how those perceptions ultimately affect reality.

When his grandfather breaks a hip, Billy lives with a foster family. There he meets Trevor a long-term ward of the state, whose tough-kid attitude isolates him from everyone. When, at 14, Billy has an affair with a 30-year-old woman on his grocery delivery route, she thanks him for treating her better than her other suitors do. Then there’s Annie Simpson, a smart, pretty girl from an ill-regarded, white trash family, who points out to Billy that though some mock his family’s fall from greatness, reputations are relative. Ê Kowalski often starts out with less-than-original characters and premises, but more often than not, these evolve and take interesting, even surprising twists and turns. Eddie’s Bastard is an ambitious novel, and no doubt future works will reflect William Kowalski’s growing maturity as a writer. ¦ Rosalind S. Fournier is managing editor of Birmingham magazine in Birmingham, Alabama.

Inspired by a true story, Peter Rock’s fifth novel is the spare, haunting tale of a father and daughter attempting to carve out an independent life while pitted against a society decidedly hostile to their eccentric choices. It’s a strange kind of love story, inspiring us to ponder large questions—what it means to be a responsible parent, and whether, in the modern world, the tension between the urge to live a solitary existence of rugged integrity can be reconciled with the implacable demands of civilization.

When the novel opens, Caroline, the precocious 13-year-old narrator whose voice Rock skillfully channels, is living with a stern but obviously loving man we know only as “Father” in a vast nature preserve called Forest Park in Portland, Oregon. They occupy an improvised dwelling, where Caroline learns geometry and chess and combs the pages of an encyclopedia, simultaneously honing her survival skills. She imbibes the lessons taught by her father’s heroes, icons of individualism like Thoreau and Emerson whose epigrams are threaded through the story.

The pair is arrested after a jogger stumbles upon their hideout, and the authorities send them to a horse farm, where he will work while Caroline enters a public school. But it’s clear they’re not meant to exist in what amounts to captivity, and soon Father engineers their escape. They ascend into the wintry wilderness of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, whose harsh beauty Rock evokes in economical prose, but quickly are overmatched by the conditions they confront. Events soon force Caroline to make her way alone in the world, fortified with only her native common sense and the teachings her father has shared with her.

My Abandonment is a teasingly ambiguous tale that leaves our speculation about Caroline and Father to linger in the air like the smoke from a dying campfire: is their relationship empowering or toxic? Are the true lessons children learn from their parents the ones those parents intend to impart? These questions, and others equally challenging, make this novel a thoughtful one that readers will savor.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

In his tightly written and swift moving new novel, author John Ridley weaves a taut and terrific tale about a loser whose life suddenly changes when he meets a woman. But Ridley, with his gritty writing style, offers a new perspective on the all too familiar boy meets girl story. Love Is a Racket is the celebrated writer’s sophomore literary effort and the much awaited follow-up to his bestseller, Stray Dogs. In his new book, the author uses a no-nonsense and earthy writing style that immediately ensnares readers from the moment they are introduced to the main character. Jeffty Kittridge is a down-and-out drunk, who lies, cheats, steals, and pretty much does what he has to do to make it on the tough and not so friendly streets of Los Angeles. The philosophy of the street hustler is simple: con or be conned; use or be used.

Indebted to loan sharks for gambling debts totaling a cool $15k and shuffling from curb side to rooming house to wherever, Jeffty is constantly scheming and plotting his next con in order to earn a buck or two and get the sharks of his back. He is a character readers will not pity; as we are led through his bouts with the DT’s, frequent and violent assaults from the sharks, and wayward life of the streets, a got what he deserved attitude is probably what readers will feel. Eventually, he meets a woman named Gayle. Homeless, helpless, yet beautiful, the two get together for sex and good times. Jeffty believes he has fallen in love and vows to change his ways in order to build a life with Gayle. Whether his words and actions are for real or just another con remains a secret until the end of the book.

Love Is a Racket is, at turns, a sarcastic and funny book that tells it like it is and paints a vivid picture of life on the streets. It also shows to what extremes people will go in order to survive, especially when it involves matters of the heart usually someone else’s. Glenn Townes is a journalist in Kansas City, Missouri.