Book Quarterly

Our critics suss out reading material for the autumn months.

The Mind's Eye
By Oliver Sacks

The abrupt loss of the ability to read, see or recognize faces seems, perhaps most tragically, like a loss of one's self. If the universe snatches a sense from you, it must mean it's stolen one-fifth of your personhood along with it. But in The Mind's Eye, triple-threat neurologist/artist/writer Oliver Sacks assures the young and healthy (for now) that this isn't so: When Lilian, a celebrated pianist since the age of 4, can no longer read music, she suddenly becomes able to re-create whole masterpieces in her head after hearing them just once. And when Pat develops aphasia, or the loss of language, she learns how to gesture her intentions with a strength "amounting almost to genius." Indeed, there's a biological reason for this: Studies show that the auditory parts of the brain in deaf people (or visual parts in the blind) don't atrophy, but instead take on new duties, like a laborer studying IT after his factory is shuttered. In fact, becoming blind actually elevates one of Sacks' subjects by diluting his other talents: "His writing became stronger and deeper. ... He felt he was on solid ground at last." Similarly, it's said that John Milton penned his best poetry only after losing his sight. This spin on aphasia, facial blindness and other inconceivably weird deficiencies is a warm bath for anyone who's currently caring for Bubbe, but Sacks is so committed to a motivational narrative that he doesn't convey the bottomless dread the newly handicapped must feel. Still, in an increasingly stimulating world that seems to be digitally creating sixth, seventh and even eighth senses, the book raises an important question: What do we have to gain from loss? (Knopf, 288 pp., $26.95, Oct. 26)

Philadelphia Noir
Edited by Carlin Romano

It took long enough for Akashic's noir series to get to Philly. Now that it has, compiled under the shadowy auspices of Inquirer literary critic/West Philly native Carlin Romano, the fun (?) begins. First things first: "You won't find the obvious here," writes Romano in his intro. "I thank my contributors for their very limited references to hoagies, cheesesteaks, water ice, soft pretzels, and waitresses who call their customers 'Hon.' There's no glimpse of ... the rowers by the Waterworks, and only one passing mention of Rocky. Truth is, we don't talk much about those things. We just live our lives." In Philadelphia Noir, life gets broken into its varying neighborhoods and moods. Aimee LaBrie writes wrenchingly but with cool detachment of a server at Ray's Happy Birthday Bar, held captive by a local. Keith Gilman's take on Devil's Pocket is densely nuanced and particularly jaunty. Laura Spagnoli's tale of Rit Row starts with dry, witty bantering in the Square, moves to the familiar pairing of credit-card nabbers, and winds up washing out the damned spots of blood in a bathroom along the Liberty Court food thoroughfare. One-time CP boss Duane Swierczynski does hard-boiled for a living, so his Frankford files are particularly ratty. Gerald Kolpan is trying to do hard-boiled for a living (see his recent novel, Etta), so his look at South Street's minions is particularly crusty. (Akashic, 300 pp., $15.95, Nov. 1).

Great House
By Nicole Krauss

Inasmuch as Great House is a novel about a desk, it belongs to a weird atavistic strain of novels that follow objects, rather than people. This sort of thing — historians term it the "novel of circulation" — enjoyed a vogue during the hectic birth of the English novel, with Charles Johnstone's 1760 Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea, the best-known and most successful of dozens. But the novel of circulation is a little bit of a dead end: With the exception of a book here or there, like John Hersey's Antonietta or Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes, it has largely, and justly, disappeared. What these stories gain in historical scope and the ability to move among social strata, they lose in the lack of a fixed point of sympathy, in human interest. But Great House doesn't try for panorama; the nightmare of the past shows only in the margins. Krauss keeps her focus on a handful of narrators with almost incidental links to each other. In a handful of collated novellas, each beginning in the first half of the book and concluding in the second, they tell their stories in their own carefully idiosyncratic voices. Some of these have only the most tenuous connection to the desk, and some verge on caricature as Krauss strains to modulate their voices. But the best of them, a quietly devastating story about an English widower struggling to understand his wife's dark places, makes it easy to ignore the furniture. (W.W. Norton, 289 pp., $24.95, Oct. 5.)

Palo Alto Stories
By James Franco

Actors generally make lousy authors, but James Franco is a promising exception. The various interlocking tales in Palo Alto display Franco's aptitude for "sense memory" — they feature a handful of vulnerable Northern California teenagers behaving badly while trying to be good. The characters posture and bully, drink, get high and have sex. They are (nick)named for the things they've done, or who/what they resemble. They have car accidents, try to impress each other or the opposite sex, and make foolish choices as they try to find themselves. Franco seems to be finding himself as a writer here: He favors short sentences that display his talent for turning poetic phrases — from an "atmosphere like a held breath," or "laughter that explodes like popcorn" — but he also relies on outrageous non sequiturs (especially in his story "Camp") to communicate action and/or emotion. This tendency prevents some of his stories from having a payoff — or even a point. But there are some gems — particularly "Emily," set at a homecoming dance. Likewise, Franco's triptych "April" is engaging; but another triptych attempt, "Chinatown," is a crude lowlight in this decidedly mixed bag. (Scribner, 208 pp., $24, Oct. 19)

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk
By David Sedaris

"That was some of the silliest shit I've ever read," snorted the brown grizzly after flipping through Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, a collection of dysfunctional animal fables by David Sedaris. As she placed the cute book (illustrated by Olivia creator Ian Falconer) on the bedside table, she began to ponder how he got off rattling on about the problems of animals, when he obviously possessed a few quirks of his own. Then she was struck with an idea: "I bet he wrote those tales from personal experience, using creatures to make it seem cutesy." She chuckled as she imagined him in some of the stories: There's the one about the kiss-ass baboon hairstylist who would say anything to snag a good tip; the chicken openly considering lesbianism; or the stingy cow who reluctantly agreed to enter a Secret Santa contest, only to discover the turkey who drew her name was on the menu for Christmas dinner. "It's not as great as his previous work, but it's pretty damn funny," she finally decided. "I'll put it next to the pot so I can laugh every time I take a poop." Satisfied with her decision, she reached down to yank a tick out of her ass before settling in for a long winter's nap. (Little, Brown & Co., 176 pp., $21.99, Sept. 28)

Sunset Park
By Paul Auster

Pieced together from the narratives of six well-drawn yet all uniquely unreliable characters, Miles Heller's life story unspools over the course of Paul Auster's latest novel, Sunset Park. We meet Miles, a 28-year-old trash-out worker removing the angry traces and bitter remnants left by desperate former homeowners in the barrens of Florida's real estate collapse. Driven to document the slivers of lives left behind, Miles snaps desolate digital images that bear witness to the varying shades of gray and acknowledge all the blame and greed that color the crash. Echoing this cloudy palette, Auster's narrators (among them Miles' father, his high school buddy, and two women with whom he shares a squat in Brooklyn) reconstruct the unanchored adulthood that lands Miles in the Sunshine State. After eight years of self-imposed exile from self, home, family and human contact, Miles is once again forced to flee — at least until his underage girlfriend is legal — and he returns to New York, the city of his interrupted young adulthood. Although the book's narrators do their best to reconcile the Miles that washes up in New York with the Miles that went missing a decade ago, he remains a cipher. We're told he's brutally handsome, a gifted athlete, sensitive, repentant and stubborn. Yet Auster's characteristic distanced narration, which even avoids direct dialogue, makes it difficult to see the man behind the curtain. While Auster has largely abandoned the postmodern games that made his reputation, his gorgeous scene-making remains intricate and precise. It seems, however, his cool detachment doesn't always work with Miles' linear journey. (Henry Holt, 320 pp., $25, Nov. 9)

Girls to the Front
By Sara Marcus

Riot Grrrl was a revolutionary movement that allowed young women to rock out and publish zines because they had something to say — even if their playing and punctuation wasn't up to someone else's standards. It was a safe space to vent at abusive stepfathers, dismissive punk boys and a sexist culture. It was a fertile ground for backstabbing, one-upmanship and class warfare. It was all of those things, and more. Sara Marcus gets that, and with Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution, she captures all of the exhilaration, disappointment and promise of riot grrrl. She takes the rough with the smooch, as Huggy Bear memorably put it. Marcus, a former City Paper contributor who played in Philly's Boys of Now in the early '00s, interviewed more than a hundred people, read scores of zines and listened to anything she could find. She gets into people's heads: those who kicked around the initial idea in Olympia and D.C.; members of Bratmobile, Bikini Kill and Heavens to Betsy; younger girls who read between the lines of a much-derided Newsweek article and started their own chapters; and allies who felt frozen out or not quite cool enough to get in on the action. It works because Marcus is a keen social observer as well as a sharp listener, as gifted at portraying the political forces that defined the early '90s as she is at conveying the sound of Bratmobile's "Cool Schmool." Girls to the Front is a compelling account of a vital scene, and in a time when teenage girls' concerns are seen as frivolous and grown men's ball games of paramount importance, it's absolutely necessary. (Harper Perennial, 384 pp., $14.99, Sept. 28)

Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
By Danielle Evans

It's rare for a 26-year-old writer to release a story collection as her debut. Even rarer for that writer to have already been selected for Best American Short Stories, twice, by Salman Rushdie and Richard Russo, no less. But in Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, Danielle Evans proves more than just precocious. Her sharp, assured stories, primarily about young black or multiracial women in Mid-Atlantic cities, capture the experiences of youth and young adulthood with genuine maturity. While race isn't her only subject, it's always in the conversation, informing relationships among family members, lovers and friends. "There were a whole lot of men we were supposed to stay away from according to my mother: rap stars, NBA players, white men," the 15-year-old narrator of "Virgins" confesses. "We didn't really know any of those kinds of people." When a white college student becomes an egg donor in "Harvest," her non-white roommates understand that "It wasn't our eggs they wanted. ... Columbia credentials be damned, no one was interested in paying us for our genetic material." These are tales of individual lives, but Evans, who's writing a novel called The Empire Has No Clothes, clearly speaks for a generation — one that demands to be heard. (Riverhead, 240 pp., $25.95, Sept. 23)

My Year of Flops
By Nathan Rabin

For My Year of Flops: The A.V. Club Presents One Man's Journey Deep into the Heart of Cinematic Failure, Nathan Rabin pretty much does just that: In this laugh-out-loud collection, he's expanded 35 of his A.V. Club columns and added 15 new reviews — including flop films like 1956's The Conqueror (starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan) and more contemporary disasters like Freddy Got Fingered ("If you were to give a talented but deeply disturbed 12-year-old money to make a movie," Rabin says, "I'd suspect it'd be a lot like this one"). Rabin uses a simple scale (failure, fiasco, secret success) to assess the movies in question, including a surprise endorsement of Heaven's Gate, Michael Cimino's 1980 Western which almost destroyed United Artists. Flops is bookended by two separate viewings and subsequent reviews of Elizabethtown — with two totally different conclusions. (Scribner, 288 pp., $15, Oct. 19.)

Seeing Further
Edited by Bill Bryson

The Royal Society of London has been the brain stem of many of the biggest scientific discoveries of the past 350 years, but there are a few skeletons in those lab closets. In the early days, when the Fellows weren't making strides in physics, medicine, math and chemistry, they were trying to inflate dogs with air to cure colic. Instead the dogs exploded. "No matter how many dogs they explode, they keep at it, certain that the next time they inflate a dog they'll achieve the proposed result," writes Margaret Atwood in "Of the Madness of Mad Scientists: Jonathan Swift's Grand Academy." Appropriately, the essays in Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery and the Genius of the Royal Society are as free in limning the Society's many successes as its missteps, but not all are so gruesome, or so tangible. Margaret Wertheim's piece on the spiritual crisis of cosmology is a deceptive maelstrom of theoretical thinking. It didn't make me feel dumb, just lost. In general, though, Bryson's assembled a surprisingly readable collection covering some heavy subjects. Credit his crack team of writers — many of whom have Pulitzers, Nobel Prizes or MacArthur genius grants. (William Morrow, 512 pp., $35, Nov. 2.)