If, like me, you scan every book you read for detailed descriptions of sex and violence, you might be a little disappointed by Judith Budnitz's Nice Big American Baby, as there really aren't any. However, there are twelve modern fables in which the everyday intersects with the supernatural to create bizarre and surprising situations, which are riveting despite their deficit of filth.
   In "Elephant and Boy," an Industrial Revolution-era female philanthropist attempts to "fix" the life of a young male elephant handler by stealthily setting his beloved elephant up for a poaching; she ends up ruining the boy's life. The moral: If somethin' ain't broken, don't try to fix it. Also, don't kill elephants. (This particular story produced a tearful catharsis, the likes of which I hadn't felt since reading Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul.)
   A strong stomach is required for "The Kindest Cut," the story of a doctor at a makeshift hospital who specializes in separating gangrenous limbs from their owners throughout the Civil War. Unsurprisingly, the Good Doctor descends into madness as he obsesses over and begins to "collect" the various severed limbs. In "Where We Come From,"

Ah, the eternal question: Who are you? Roger Daltrey, for one, really wants to know. According to Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude), that little quandary can be illuminated through the books you hoard, the movies you'll spit on yourself defending, and the band that drove a wedge between you and your lover.
   Who, then, is Lethem? For starters, he's the Talking Heads guy in college: "I might have wished to wear the album Fear of Music in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me." He's also read nearly every Philip K. Dick book ad nauseam, and, as a thirteen-year-old, he shamefully admits, saw Star Wars twenty-one times. But that's not the most embarrassing revelation in The Disappointment Artist, nine essays about the personal as linked through the preferential. Sometimes, when Lethem works himself into a frenzy trying to get to the bottom of one of his fascinations, there's nothing to do but back away slowly, making as little noise as possible.
   For every exhausting spiral, Lethem has many more moments that are transcendent and gorgeous. The title essay, an examination of writer Edward Dahlberg, "the Ozzy Osbourne of writing-teaching," is a trip through the spooky backwoods of a tortured soul's legacy. As a fan who has dumped some of his original loves, Lethem is sympathetic to the artist who could never allow himself to be a fan of anything. — Margaret Wappler

In the title story of Amy Hempel's latest story collection, a divorced guide-dog trainer faces the certain heartbreak of losing her beloved black lab. "A love affair begins with a fantasy. For instance, that the beloved will always be there. But these love affairs begin with a yearning, for a future that won't be shared," says the trainer, as sage as a Buddhist monk. Nevertheless, she records the sound of her dog's snores before he goes.
   This tension between fantasy and reality, between memory and truth, is at the heart of this sharp, spare collection. In "Offertory," a woman tells her lover embellished stories of a previous affair with a couple. In "What Were the White Things?" the audience at an artist's lecture lavishes attention on a painting's crockery, while ignoring the nude woman beside it. And in "Jesus is Waiting," a woman finds temporary peace in the barren no-man's land of the New Jersey Turnpike: "Mostly it is just about the sounds of the car, of driving, of the fade-in and fade-out of the radio, the removal from everything but the moving body in a vehicle, of the is-ness of passing from here to there, of not being where you were, of Jesus waiting."
   As the characters struggle with the aftershocks of death, divorce and lost dogs, Hempel deftly records people facing the uncomfortable realities of their life, as well as the moments when they play the old tapes, even if they are of a sleeping dog. — Sara Eckel

Everyone has an Underminer, a so-called friend who gradually, subtly erodes your self-confidence, belittling and manipulating you in the name of friendship; who shows up when you're at your lowest to tell you all about their unfettered success. Mike Albo and Virginia Heffernan's The Underminer chronicles fourteen years of one-sided conversations with just such a person; it will leave you captivated and maybe a little unhinged.
   Expanded from a series of Albo's comic monologues, the book begins with the same urbane wit and light touch. But Albo uses the novel to more fully explore the darker, unsettling implications of this toxic relationship. Particularly harrowing and hilarious is a drug-induced mishap at the Burning Man Festival.
   More than just a darkly comic portrait of a manipulative friendship, Albo's book is an illustration of the chronic insecurity that comes of our cultural obsession with fame, success and the media, with style over substance. The Underminer is not just a person or an interior voice, but the undoing of authenticity itself. — Andy Horwitz