Shira Nayman's Awake in the Dark, a collection of three stories and a novella, is another work focusting tightly on a single theme: the Holocaust and the way in which the harrowing events of that time ripple through the lives of her characters, both past and present, to indelibly shape their identities. Nayman is adept at reversing the reader's expectations as her characters grapple with the weight of the burden history has placed upon them. In the first two stories, "The House on Kronenstrasse" and "The Porcelain Monkey," the protagonists make startling discoveries about their parents that transform the way each looks at the world. In "Dark Urgings of the Blood," the novella that makes up half the book, Nayman brings to bear her training as a clinical psychologist to tell the haunting story of a psychiatrist and her patient, unknowingly linked by tragic circumstances.

As befits their subject matter, these four stories are dark and often troubling. Nayman's talent lies in her ability to illumine the essential humanity at their core.

Harvey Freedenberg writes from Pennsylvania.

There are good books and great books. And then there are books like Daniel Handler's Adverbs. Reading it feels like calling in sick when you don't feel sick so you can curl up on the sofa with a mug of hot chocolate and a fluffy blanket and watch the rain fall. It's a Bloody Mary for the hung-over heart. I have such a crush on this book.

You might know Handler better as his alter ego, children's book author Lemony Snicket (A Series of Unfortunate Events). He's written two other grown-up novels, The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth. And now, as if that weren't enough, with his third adult book he proves himself a master of the love story. Adverbs is a collection of 16 interlinking stories built around the ways in which people love each other: soundly, obviously, naturally, often, etc. The book begins, as love often does, with the immediate, the obvious and the brief, moving quickly toward cold and complicated before winding up at barely and judgmentally.

Some of the stories are sadder than yours, and some are incandescently happy, and almost all of them are hilarious in places. The same characters or at least the same names show up in several stories at different ages, and key phrases or elements keep kaleidoscoping through the collection, giving the whole thing a disorienting, dizzy-in-love kind of feel. Is the Lila who's desperately ill in "Soundly" the same eye-rolling Lila who tears tickets at the theater in "Obviously"? Is Andrea at the bar also Andrea the ex-girlfriend and Andrea the cab driver? And just how many Joes and Hanks are in this book, anyway? You soon figure out it doesn't matter. It's not who loves, it's how they love that counts.

Trying to pinpoint the nature of love leads to some of the author's best observations. In "Frigidly," he writes, "When love appears it's a supernatural thing like the songs say, but eventually you have to get out of bed, even on the coldest of days, and pay the rent." That sums it up almost perfectly.

Becky Ohlsen writes infatuatedly from Portland, Oregon.

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
A San Antonio Express Best Book of the year

In this inventive collection of stories, Chris Adrian treads the terrain of human suffering—illness, regret, mourning, sympathy—in the most unusual ways. A bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. A boy tries to contact the spirit of his dead father and finds himself talking to the Devil instead. A ne’er do well pediatrician returns home to take care of his dying father, all the while under the scrutiny of an easily-disappointed heavenly agent. With its cast of living and dead characters, and its deft balance of the spiritual and the misanthropic, Adrian has created a haunting work of spectral beauty and wit.

RELATED CONTENT

Read the title story in the New Yorker.

The buzz about Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk's new collection of linked short stories, Haunted, is the type that will either scare you off immediately or have you scratching at bookshop doors to get in the minute the book comes out. There's no in-between, especially not when the main thing people are saying about this collection is that one of the stories makes audiences at author readings pass out, weep and vomit.

Well, don't be scared. The story in question, Guts, is such an over-the-top grossout spectacular that it ends up being more funny than disturbing. And that's a good thing. Palahniuk is a funny guy. Haunted is less a collection of horror stories than a warped satire, a combination of Survivor, Fear Factor and that Exquisite Corpse game where each person contributes a paragraph to the same story. The characters are named after their personalities: Miss Sneezy, Agent Tattletale, Miss America, Comrade Snarky. They all saw the same ad for a three-month writer's retreat. It's every aspiring author's dream: escape your real life for a while, and there's nothing to stop you from creating a masterpiece. But the retreat turns out to be not quite as advertised.

Things begin to go wrong almost immediately. No one is allowed to leave the old theater where the retreat is being held. Someone breaks the glass in a window and finds impenetrable concrete behind it. Rebellious would-be authors sabotage the food supply, then the furnace. In an effort to force the directors to let her out, one character hacks off her ear with a knife. This not only fails to get her out but also inspires the rest of the retreat-goers to hack off bits of themselves in an ever more obsessive race to become the star of the inevitable movie of their lives. Sure, they want to be rescued but not until things get bad enough to make a really great story.

Meanwhile, they're all sort of doing what they came for: telling stories. Interspersed with the narrative about what's going on at the retreat are short stories, each supposedly written by one of the characters. (Never mind that all the stories sound like they're written by Chuck Palahniuk.) These get more brutal as the situation becomes increasingly dire. In one, a resuscitation dummy is put to not necessarily educational use by a police department. In another, a reporter down on his luck frames and kills a former child star to win a Pulitzer. In several of them, children go missing for horrific reasons.

Still, the scariest thing about the stories is the same thing that's always scary in a Palahniuk book the hints of evil lurking underneath a seemingly placid reality. He's an expert at inducing paranoia by rattling off details that make you question long-held assumptions. Are those people who stand in line at movie premieres actually paid to be there, just to make the movie seem more exciting? Can you kill someone with a foot massage? Are the homeless really just bored millionaires out slumming? Can you explode from eating too many freeze-dried dinners at once? It doesn't even matter if the answer to these questions is yes. Once you're presented with the question, you can't shake it. (After Fight Club, for example, will anyone ever order clam chowder in a restaurant again?) It haunts you. And that is pretty scary.

Becky Ohlsen writes from Portland, Oregon.

In The Courage Consort, Michel Faber's latest literary offering, readers are drawn into three very different worlds with one prevailing theme: the abject loneliness that often marks the human condition. With these novellas, Faber shows a particular gift for exposing the raw emotions so uncomfortably familiar to us all. The title story (which is also the strongest) introduces the reader to a British vocal group spending two weeks in a secluded Belgian manor as they labor over a particularly complex piece. Although they all sing as one, each of them is emotionally isolated from the other—particularly married couple Roger and Catherine Courage. As the fortnight unfolds, members of the motley ensemble struggle to relate, both personally and professionally. Then they are faced with a sudden tragedy that threatens their identity as a whole.

In "The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps," Sian, a melancholy woman disabled in a car accident, joins an archeological dig at Whitby Abbey. There she begins to uncover the details of a long-ago murder, while also unearthing some of her own buried emotions, discovering that the past can link to the present in the most unexpected of ways.

"The Fahrenheit Twins" is the book's most bizarre tale. Its main characters are Tainto'lilith and Marko'cain, young twins living in a faraway arctic land with their distant and frequently absent parents. Self-sufficient and completely cut off from the world, these children have created their own charmed universe. When their mother suddenly dies, reality pierces their idyllic existence, forcing them to realize for the first time how truly alone they are.

Based in Scotland, Faber has won several awards for his novels and short stories, including the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Neil Gunn Prize. His dialogue drips with British witticisms, and his prose can seem rather dry at first. But as his stories unfold, his work becomes increasingly poetic. Haunting, intimate and quietly sad, these tales should stay with readers for a long time.

Rebecca Krasney Stropoli writes from New York City.