Ben Greenman fascinatingly explores marriage malaise and suburban sadness in his new novel The Slippage. William and Louisa Day are a young, childless husband and wife. Against a beautifully boring backdrop of lawn parties and school recitals, business trips and rote routines, Greenman brilliantly teases out the ache and tenacity underneath the everyday grind of the Days and the couples they know.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 04/23/13

Shawn Vestal's short story collection Godforsaken Idaho (New Harvest) is violent, full of dreamy ache. Vestal writes about an absurdly and often hilariously heartbreaking Heaven, where you can order food from any moment in your life and family members and mistakes haunt you.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 04/04/13

Kelly Oxford's Everything Is Perfect When You're A Liar (ItBooks) is a hilariously mortifying memoir. From accidental urination, to her hopeless DiCaprio crush, to therapy, to magic—like the David Copperfield kind—Oxford plumbs her past for painful moments and turns them into slyly funny stories.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 04/03/13

Smoky, seductive, smart, and full of both beautiful and sad family lore, Hannah Rothschild's The Baroness: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild (Knopf) is a sweeping biography.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 03/27/13

Scott McClanahan's Crapalachia: A Biography of a Place (Two Dollar Radio) is a raucous remembrance of the author's redneck youth.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 03/19/13

Andrea Pitzer's The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov (Pegasus) explores the famous writer's life and how his times impacted his work. When his idyllic childhood is shattered by the Russian Revolution and his family is forced to flee, Nabokov's life was irrevocably changed.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 03/14/13

As editor of The Heroin Chronicles, Jerry Stahl, who wrote about his junkie past in caustic, honest, and often hilarious tones in his memoir Permanent Midnight, has compiled stories from fellow opiate chasers from Lydia Lunch and Tony O'Neil to Antonia Crane and Nathan Larson.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 02/25/13

Jason Mulgrew is an expert at playing awkward. In his book 236 Pounds of Class Vice President: A Memoir of Teenage Insecurity, Obesity, and Virginity (Harper Perennial), he chronicles his hilariously dorky childhood.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 02/13/13