Gary Amdahl, "Visigoth"

Wanting to be the next Raymond Carver is the literary version of wanting to be an astronaut when you grow up. There's a difference though: most boys realize that their chances of flying to the moon are nil, and they grow up to be middle management. The same cannot be said for the ersatz Carvers of the world--it's like some folksy version of Camus' philosophie de la revolte (oh, and speaking of Camus, isn't it a shame he couldn't have written about lumberjacks and long-haul truckers?) takes hold and they end up producing impenetrably boring 500-page exegeses on, as Tim Hall once put it, "engine lights and sandwiches." On the other hand, a few of these guys have created some great fiction. (I was particularly fond of Scott Wolven's Controlled Burn which came out last year. And remember Robert Bingham? I thought he had promise too.)

Magnus Mills, "Explorers of the New Century"

It's really difficult to describe Magnus Mills' new book, Explorers of the New Century, without drawing comparisons to Ricky Gervais and Black Adder, as others have. Is it the food or the climate that breeds the UK's deadpan, dark humor?

Mills' latest work imagines the mundane, day-to-day existence of two teams of early-20th-century explorers who are competing to see who can cross a barren, unspecified landmass to reach the Agreed Furthest Point. Under the circumstances, this could have been potentially the most boring subject ever, but when I began Explorers, Mills' skillful, terse language and absurd, black humor took me completely off guard.

Simon Reynolds, "Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84"

The cover of music journalist Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84 is black and pink and yellow, recalling both Nevermind the Bollocks and Dick Hebdige's Subculture. It's an exhaustive, jampacked textbook of an era that seems a bit hard to grant true cohesion to; such is the problem of any movement with the term post- prepended to its name. It could be argued that the only thing that most of the bands in Rip It Up shared in common was the time in which they were recording and performing.

Rick Moody, "The Diviners"

This is ordinarily where a review would be my long-awaited review of Rick Moody's new book. I was supposed to write it this weekend. Instead I found myself drinking from king cans of Bud with mystery objects floating inside and gnawing on chicken bones. I promise it'll be here soon. Here it IS, BIZNATCHES!

Oh, and [SPOILER ALERT!] by the way, I freakin' loved it. Unlike everyone else.

Jill Ciment, "The Tattoo Artist"

The Tattoo Artist by Jill Ciment is the fictional story of Sara Ehrenreich, a Jewish seamstress from the Lower East Side who took her chances seducing a wealthy art-lovin’ avant-garde revolutionary and ended up marrying him and becoming an acclaimed painter herself, only to suffer the loss of their fortune early on in the Depression, and end up stranded on a remote South Pacific island after the ship they’re expecting to return never picks them up.

Joe Meno, "How the Hula Girl Sings"

Following the great success of Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned, Akashic Books has come out with a paperback reissue of How the Hula Girl Sings, his somewhat-ignored second novel (published in 2001 under the ReganBooks imprint). It should be a win-win situation for both Meno and Akashic for a couple reasons: Hula Girl is a tight little read that clearly got lost in the House of Judith; and also? Joe Meno's red-hot right now.

Bret Easton Ellis, "Lunar Park"

Here's the biggest problem with Bret Easton Ellis: You can't tell if, to paraphrase Ann Magnuson, he's being ironic or sarcastic or postmodern. His career peaked with American Psycho, his worst book. And despite the media blitz, and the inexplicable handjob reviews from odd places, it's safe to say that Lunar Park is not going to help him reclaim that notoriety.

John Twelve Hawks, "The Traveler"

The Traveler is more than just slick-as-spit commercial sci-fi. It's also one of the most courageously overhyped books of the year. With ads running on blogs that should know better (or care more), posters wheatpasted at every construction site in NYC (and God knows where else), an intitial print run of eleventy-bazillion, an apocryphal mystery man author, and a reported seven-figure advance, "The Traveler" could either be the next...whuzzat...DeVito Code?...or a bigger flop than Heaven's Gate and Waterworld put together.

Dana Adam Shapiro, "The Every Boy"

Open the contemporary novel, any contemporary novel, and you’ll likely be met by an army of preternaturally intelligent children. Defined by a certain otherworldly worldliness, they cannot fail to charm us with their exceptional wit, creepy nascent adulthood, and uncommon ability to read the hidden intentions of witless grown-ups. Dana Adam Shapiro’s "The Every Boy" is no exception to the new rule—no kid can ever just be normal.

Cheryl Mendolsohn, "Home Comforts"

As any of you who've been to visit can attest, I am a consummate slob. I've always been this way, and it might be partially genetic. I also attribute it to my mother's Sisyphian take on housekeeping: It's an arduous, all-day, everyday task, not unlike working in the diamond mines in South Africa. The vacuum cleaner was just another piece of furniture in the living room. The bathroom sink was the permanent repository for rubber gloves. You could outfit a plaid flannel army with my father's shirts that sat waiting to be ironed.

Richard Hell, "Godlike"

I've heard tell that Richard Hell doesn't like talking about punk but it's hard to introduce him without appending some sort of paragraph-long epithet to his name. Hell is a punk auteur, poet, visionary. OK.

John McManus, "Bitter Milk"

I find it hard to read books in which the protagonist is a child. Too often, there's a level of startling insight that I don't think children are capable of; or, worse yet, there's a twee sort of innocence that makes for not only unreliable but annoying deductive reading.

Take a whiff on me

Ingrate that I am, I requested a review copy of Akashic Books' Cocaine Chronicles and subsequently forgot to mention it here. It's a collection of short stories with the same theme: cocaine and its multifarious forms.

It's a diverse group of writers, from Lee Child to Jerry Stahl to Laura Lippman. Stahl's contribution, Twilight of the Stooges, is by far my favorite. Nina Revoyr's Golden Pacific and Susan Straight's Poinciana are both poignant, hideous portraits of the inevitable sex work driven by the need for crack. And the fantastic Chemistry, by Robert Ward, is like a cross between Gaddis and the Twilight Zone.

Anthologies never fail to have a couple head-scratching duds, and I was particularly disappointed by Lippman's story, The Crack Cocaine Diet, and James Brown's The Screenwriter. Still, Chronicles was a fun, fast (heh) read. It's a bit of a time capsule of the late 80s and early 90s, which were truly the golden years of crack. In a few more years, I'll expect a lot of really, really long crystal meth anthologies.