Just out today, a new novel by Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share without Knowing. I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of this book, and, though I’ve never met the author in my life, this was an easy book to blurb: From the frantic streets of Tokyo to the surreal silence of rural Japan, Christopher Barzak spins the familiar yarn of the everyday world into a magical universe. Following in the themes of his stunning debut, One for Sorrow, Barzak once again tackles loneliness and longing, and elegantly blurs the divide between the living and the dead. The Love We Share Without Knowing is haunting, strange, and utterly surprising from the first page to the last.

Sometimes you go through dry spells when it comes to reading–you know what I mean–those weeks, months even, when you open book after book, unable to find anything that really moves you. For some reason, the past two weeks have been the opposite of that. I keep finding books to love. Here are a couple of them.

The Theory of Light and Matter: Stories by Andrew Porter.
Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, this collection of ten tautly constructed stories is quiet, moving, sometimes funny, and marked again and again by genuine emotion. What impressed me most about these stories is the way they unfold at a casual, told-by-a-friend pace, very direct and simple, before hitting you straight on with some insight that they’ve been subtly working toward all along. From “Storms,” in which a young man watches his sister self-destruct:

In the books the psychologists had given to Amy and me as children, I remembered reading stories about people who claimed that after one of their parents died they were just never happy again. I understood this to be the case with my sister and sometimes my mother. Life goes on, but it’s different now. It’s softer, duller. The highs are less high and the lows seem to have an endless depth to them, a depth you have to be wary of falling into…it occurred to me that Amy had probably spent most of her life on the edge of that depth, unwilling to let herself fall in, but frightened all the same by its presence.

Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O’Nan
One of the best books I’ve read this year. Although this is a story in which very little happens, one man’s struggle to end his years of service to The Red Lobster with dignity, and to be a decent human being in the process, kept me spellbound.

Another story collection that I devoured with hardly a trip to the kitchen for coffee and Hydrox cookies was Pia Z. Ehrhardt’s Famous Fathers.
These stories are as seductive as their heroines, dripping with the mystique of New Orleans, tense with the characters’ often-failed attempts to rein in their larger-than-life desires. A spectacular Christmas gift for the Scorpio in your life, or for anyone to whom you want to send a message about infidelity, jealousy, or the perils of family.