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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?

Verily miffed by the chancres of chance, chronically ineffective politician Derek Haffman affects to effect an unspecified political revolution by pickpocketing his colleagues in the lobby of the Scottish Parliament. In the wake of the abject failure of this objectless mission, repercussions naturally unfold in painfully precise procession, forcing Derek and his chronically untalented mistress, the singer in an avant-garde rock band too toxic for human ears, to flee to Cádiz. An unexpected visit from disgraced former politician and bestselling author Jethro Quiver unpeels another layer from the onion of shame in this shambling comic novel that chronicles the descent of a passionately aimless man, a rebel unable to think up an appropriate cause to lend his rebelling talents.A pleasantly unpleasant tale told in four blissfully interminable chapters by the Milky Way's leading virtuoso of the vowels and consonants, The Fall and Fall of Derek Haffman is the perfect read for anyone open to consider that unspecified solutions to unidentified political problems may not yield juicily delectable results.

From the vantage point of his window on humanity's breathlessly accelerating runaway train, Aaron Anstett records the fast receding frames as they flit by, and asks vital questions like "what now," "how do you know," and "why does God allow dry stuffing?" Yet the busily bopping, unpunctuated ribbon of his verse traces in meditative endlessness a shape outside itself, that of a vast engulfing silence.

Teeth, like a weeping father at a wedding, give you away. Like St Peter, they will betray you three times: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Teeth are a memento mori, a sudden glimpse of the naked skull beneath the skin.John Patrick Higgins has had bad teeth for as long as he can remember and you might expect him, being English, not to notice. But he has noticed, and he's doing something about it.This book recounts his journey from a mouthful of moist gravel to a pristine, pacific smile, with the Pole-star wattage of a Hollywood A-lister.But first comes the horror of "stabilisation". The trenches dug into his gums. The water-boarding horror of the dentist's chair. The deforestation of his bank account.Will he survive the ordeal? And if he does-blinking into that bright new day-will there be anything to smile about?Teeth: An Oral History is a bitingly funny story, illustrated by the author, and featuring a glossary of useful terms, as most of his references pre-date the discovery of fluoride.

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.

Ian Monk's 14 × 14, here translated from the original French by Philip Terry and the author, is a collection of fourteen poems, interspersed with interludes, all of them fit between a prelude and coda-a sort of mille-feuille made with alternating layers of the lost and regained purity of love and the world's brutally intimate indifference.Here for example why not while waitingfor elsewhere and having been somewhere else toojust recently in this ascent straighttowards wherever and anyhow leading toneedful things to fill in the timeyour brains too or what's left of them dunnoas for me what's on the box tonight spare a dimeand what about going to a museum or the opera lol?

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.

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.

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.

Extracted from the maw of a resting shrew, these ten cankers reek of huff and qualm. A librarian teams up with a weeping bus-dweller to suppress a talentless writer. A man attempts a perfect equilibrium of pain and pleasure to forge a life of matchless keel. A triumvirate of Dans spiral into oblivion with operatic panache. Two sub-people struggle for ascension to the normal realm in a heckish caste system. Various narked sods explain the violent solutions to their popular problems in a tale that Butch Vig might call "titular". Someone explains the complex sociological web of mayhem that is the modern coffeehouse. Postmodernism makes a shocking return in a classic postmodern tale about postmodernism shaking its postmodern bahookie. In future Texas, women attempting abortions are held captive and forced to whelp at gunpoint. And in a finale one Dutch arborist has called "a botched stew", the world's unwritten characters mingle in a bardo where their untold stories flex and throb in painful collocation. For the first time in his life, the unacclaimed novelist M.J. Nicholls has written a collection of prose fit for hexagonal man.

Preacher is not a preacher, though death's vicissitudes clamor around him in a disturbingly ecclesiastic manner. When he finds a pit bull puppy by the side of the road and gets a job at a boxing manufacturer, he declares his luck changed. One small-town cop has doubts: "It ain't your luck needs changing, but the folks you meet." And so it stands, as the sun and moon revolve in their tango-or is it a waltz?-and whisper to one another.

Chaotic Good-the complement to Neutral Evil ))), a short novel published in 2020 about seeing Sunn O))) in Philadelphia on March 18, 2017-presents another polythematic core sample, this time about taking the train to NYC to see a band-as far removed from Sunn O))) as possible-at "the world's most famous arena" on December 28, 2019 after walking too far in Brooklyn with an old troubled friend, intermittently concerned about an imminent storm of excrement, all capped by the nightly procession of nearly invisible satellites. It's an associative cascade about a foundational synesthesiac experience after an unforeseen change of plans, a cylindrical hotel deserving demolition, the renovated men's bathroom in New York Penn Station, untangling headphone cords, cleaning house before moving out, logging the past versus planning the future, ADHD, autism, Alzheimer's, preferring the documentary to the drama, waiting too long in car for spouse to return from hellacious megastore, wielding plunger on dented bumper, walking with young daughter around where you grew up, the composed part followed by the improvised part, intentionally losing now to win later, remembering once in a while that the trick is to surrender to the flow.

Did or didn't Virginia Woolf carry her walking stick with her into the River Ouse? Did Kitty Oppenheimer get it right on her fourth marital try? Was revenge Agatha Christie's motive when she disappeared in 1926? Could Estelle Faulkner out-drink husband Bill? Did Mary McCarthy believe her own hype? Was Caroline Blackwood a slob as well as a snob? In These Particular Women, Kat Meads investigates ten famous/infamous women and the exceedingly contradictory biographical and autobiographical portraits that survive them.

The surreal, confessional, stream-of-consciousness stanzas of Joseph D. Reich's 300-page, lyrical epic poem How to Shoot a Tourist (With a Bow & Arrow) in a Hot-Air Balloon run up and down the page in a desperate, fantastical rage, hypnotically interrupted by a recurring refrain from which they emerge and depart on wildly varied journeys: probing the nature, origins and psychological derivation of surrealism, looking at persistent pain within and damage and devastation without in richly "ridiculous" images that are not only surreal but satirical and questioning, while also the best answer to the idiosyncratic machinations of authority. How to Shoot a Tourist is an exhaustive mythic encyclopedia of America and of Reich's teeming inner world.

The Discerning Mollusk's Guide to Arts and Ideas. Contributions by Shahd Alshammari, Polly Atkin, Greg Bem, Jesi Bender, P.J. Blumenthal, Lynn Buckle, Jesi Buell, Marvin Cohen, Michael Collins, Mark DuCharme, William Erickson, Tom La Farge, Lauren Foley, Jack Foley, Cal Freeman, Jason Graff, John Patrick Higgins, Tomoé Hill, Charles Holdefer, David Holzman, Kurt Luchs, Melissa McCarthy, Malcolm McCollum, Letty McHugh, R.S. Mengert, Jefferson Navicky, Kathleen Nicholls, M.J. Nicholls, Dan O'Brien, Harry Parker, Elizabeth Robinson, David Rose, Tom Shakespeare, Mike Silverton, Doug Smith, Will Stanier, Matthew Tomkinson, Dan Tremaglio, and Thomas Walton.

The Discerning Mollusk's Guide to Arts and Ideas. Contributions by Paolo Albani, Greg Bem, Jesi Buell, Marvin Cohen, David Collard, Marc Estrin, Jack Foley, David Henningham, Carl Landauer, Kurt Luchs, Kat Meads, M.J. Nicholls, Dasha C. Nisula, Bobby Parrott, REYoung, Joseph D. Reich, Pamela Ryder, Deborah Bachels Schmidt, Will Stanier, Julian Stannard, Aug Stone, Mariana Sández, Christian TeBordo, Lee Upton, Thomas Walton, Tyrone Williams, and Connie Woodring.

A grieving man with a guilty conscience is tried in a kangaroo court of the imagination for the bedtime transgressions of his youth. Will he finally suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or will he-er, um-get off scot-free again?

The Support Verses: Earliest Sayings of the Buddha is Christopher Carter Sanderson's uniquely poetic and practical translation of The Dhammapada. Sanderson, working from Pali and Sanskrit sources, aims to artistically transmit the essence of Buddha's sayings in a form useful for meditation. Freely cast in a flexible, idiomatic and often catchy iambic pentameter, in tone ranging as needed from the academic to the profane, these verses combine musicality with a refreshing directness. This new creative realization joins a galaxy of inspired translations of this great work to offer additional artistic insight and spiritual utility.

At the Husavík Research Institute, a paradise of Nordic perfection where the blemished are banished and the pretty are promoted, acne-ridden Magnus is sent on a bogus anthropological fact-finding mission to visit every village, town, and city in Wales to file "reports" for Iceland's upcoming colonisation. The reports he composes are fragments of snarky travelogue, highly suspicious tales of local folklore, unforgiving recaps of childhood trauma, and cris de coeur from a misanthropic outsider fated to stalk the wild Welsh countryside suffering squeamish erotic reveries about Helga Horsedóttir. Presented in alphabetical, achronological order, Condemned to Cymru is a comico-pimply picaresque, a digressive ramble into the dark heart of boredom, and the essential reference encyclopedia of self-hatred.

In Graham Guest's novel Henry's Chapel we watch a film by proxy, through the eyes of a narrator who offers a play-by-play account, complete with probing analysis, of Albarb Noella's Lawnmower of a Jealous God. Within this unusual frame we encounter the story of an isolated family in rural East Texas, a tragicomic tale of incest, abuse, mental illness and liberation. As meta-narrative and narrative merge into one another, the film's characters, its director, and implicitly the narrator and author themselves all become significant figures, while the film itself becomes both an immersive if ghostly medium and a distanced object of critical inquiry, its meaning and being inseparable from the metafictional organism that contains it. The final product is a kind of narratological incest heretofore unexplored.

Sorry, I Broke Your Promise is a text-cosmos entwined in its own birth and decay, suffering both obscurities of erasure and, amidst the resulting caverns of darkness, twinkling ignitions of wit and purpose. Quasi-intentional structures appear (or appear to) on every scale, summoning the ghosts of meaning and compelling them to a perpetual haunting, but stubbornly, through its own self-creating processes of distortion, redaction, and interruption, the text always holds any final possibility of meaning's materialization just beyond our reach; the forms of the visible are systematically undermined by the invisible, by the power of an all-encompassing field of "dark meaning." Lest this seem deadly serious, the trials and tribulations of Light in this dark cosmic minefield are both light- and dark-hearted, absurd and profound: the charming, taunting and befuddling pratfalls of a clown who is also, both openly and secretly, Hamlet.