Best Audiobooks of 2012 So Far

An affecting memoir that voids the temptation for wholesale epiphany

There's a point in Wild, Cheryl Strayed's memoir about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, when she feels herself torn between two identities. Is she, as her trail mates have suggested, the Hapless Hiker, plagued by a series of misfortunes (too-heavy pack, shoes too small, incidents involving an iced-over tent and hundreds of tiny black frogs), or is she the "hard-ass motherfucking Amazonian queen"... that she believes herself to be in more triumphant moments? Strayed realizes, in that moment, that she is neither of them, and both of them, too, and it is this kind of complex realization that is at the heart of this inspiring book.

Strayed, a backpacking novice, decided at age 26 to take on a large chunk of the mammoth Mexican-to-Canadian-border-spanning PCT, all by herself. She'd spent several years in a downward spiral precipitated by her mother's sudden death from cancer, a spiral that took her through affairs, divorce, and substance abuse. When she happened upon a PCT guidebook at camping and hiking store, she was ready for something to transform her. The trail does, ultimately, live up to its transformative potential, both physically and mentally, but part of what makes her memoir so strong is that Strayed avoids the temptation for wholesale epiphany. The trail provides many high and low points, but it's not as clear cut as all that. When you're trying to change your life, you may not recognize one exact moment that changed you. You just look around and realize that at some point you've changed. It happens when you're doing your best to soothe your blisters after a long day of hiking, or when the sweat on your back is freezing as you hike upwards through a snow field, or when you finally get to quench that strange obsession you've developed for Snapple lemonade. Healing happens when you're waiting at a nowheresville post office for that resupply box with a fresh T-shirt in it. By the end of the book, we feel as much joy and relief in the notion of pulling on that clean T-shirt as we do with the knowledge that the trail has, indeed, allowed Strayed to gracefully lay down her pain and continue with the business of living.

There's a sense of fairness to Drift that has won some unexpected hearts and minds

"It's not a conspiracy, there aren't rogue elements pushing us to subvert our national interests to instead serve theirs. It's been more entertaining and more boneheaded than that."

For the better part of a decade, pols, pundits and wingnuts have all but held séances to make it look like their side was the one our infallible founding fathers had... in mind back in the day. It's been more truthiness than truth, which is a shame because a lot of this stuff can be put to rest with solid research and a little perspective. For Drift, Rachel Maddow - a Rhodes scholar best known for her lefty news shows on MSNBC and Air America - did her homework, dropping James Madison quotes the way Skrillex drops the bass.

This carefully researched and unimpeachably reasonable book examines the way this country has lost control of its military. It's sometimes funny. It's often funny-sad. In the beginning, the United States had no use for a standing army, and everybody liked it that way. "America's structural disinclination toward war is not a sign that something's gone wrong. It's not a bug in the system. It is the system," Maddow writes (and reads; hooray for author-narrators).

Or it was the system. But, after two-centuries-plus of warfare, we've somehow become a country proud of its standing army and military-industrial culture. Drift is about how we got here, how we allowed each mile marker (Vietnam, Grenada, Iran-Contra, Iraq, Afghanistan) to steer us off the path. How we became a nation more eager to go to war even as our distaste for it was growing. How the legislative branch has demurred to the executive. How we've managed to tune out the wars our country is involved in today.

Maddow's approach is a bit drier than Sarah Vowell's, but she has Bill Bryson's skill for making the complicated feel accessible. Above all, although Maddow makes no bones about her liberal predilections, there's a sense of fairness to Drift that has won some unexpected hearts and minds. The Ron Paul people are down with it, as is Roger Ailes, president of Fox News.

Laugh-out-loud wit and plenty of self-deprecation

"Where have you been?" is the question former Saturday Night Live funnywoman Rachel Dratch is most frequently asked, and with her humorous memoir Girl Walks into a Bar, now we know. With stories of her struggle to find an identity at Dartmouth, a "that's show biz" dismissal from 30 Rock, the insulting roles offered to her (obese ugly old lesbians) and misadventures in romance along the way,... Dratch's tale occasionally threatens to lurch into the territory of the actress' famous SNL character Debbie Downer. But Dratch always rescues these tales from a "woe is me" vibe with laugh-out-loud wit and self-deprecation. Dratch's love of comedy, from her funny family to her days playing with her friends at Chicago's Second City, trumps every anecdote. Dratch's story is left open-ended, as a surprise pregnancy (the actress originally mistook the symptoms of pregnancy for early-onset menopause) shook up her life and threw a burgeoning relationship into a to-this-day ill-defined state. For an entertainer who has come to make the most of the curveballs life has thrown her way, Dratch's story is best left as it is, without a neatly wrapped finale, letting readers know that the lack of a definitive 'happily ever after" isn't necessarily a bad thing.

A rallying call for introverts everywhere to…be quiet

America, argues author Susan Cain, is a land of extroverts. This will not be news to anyone who has had a teacher or boss badger them to "come out of your shell" and "seize the day," but what might be surprising is Cain's unabashed support for the introvert lifestyle. We've been socially conditioned to equate outgoing with good, and Quiet is Cain's largely successful defense... of anyone who ever just wanted to be left alone. Cain makes a good case that America evolved into an extrovert paradise right around the beginning of the 20th century, when Carl Jung invented the personality types "introvert" and "extrovert" and Dale Carnegie built an empire teaching people how to release their inner chatterbox. Once these values became entrenched in the culture - and enshrined at the top of the corporate ladder - says Cain, they became synonymous with success and virtue, forcing introverts like herself to change their ways. Relying on everyone from Warren Buffett to Rosa Parks to make her case, Cain here points out the virtues of introversion, even going so far as to argue that our economy might not be in the pits if there were a few more introverts in the board rooms. Though Cain can occasionally overreach - by the end of the book it seems that all the good people in the world are introverts - this passionate, earnest defense of quiet people is a necessary antidote to the triumph of extroversion in American daily life.

An attempt to re-complicate blackness

Attention, black people. Listen up, white people. Hey, everybody. Baratunde Thurston - author, political blogger, cable-news talking head, comedian, tech nerd and the digital director of The Onion - knows what you know and what you think you know about black people in America. He's got 30-plus years experience as an African American. He's heard the same things you have, from the stereotypes and the sad-but-trues to the... diluted history lessons and popularly accepted narratives. And he's not buying them.

"In the age of President Barack Obama, all of them are limiting and simply inadequate to the task of capturing the reality of blackness," he writes in the introduction to this funny, poignant, biting (and a little bit baiting) memoir/satire. "In this book, I will attempt to re-complicate blackness."

From there he intertwines his personal journey (raised by his mom, simultaneously enrolled in a mostly white prep school and a "black power boot camp," cleaned toilets/took classes at Harvard) with sometimes silly, but more often straight-faced and subtly scathing, chapters like "How to Be the Black Friend," "How to Be the Black Employee," and "How to Speak for All Black People." Along the way he solicits input from a "Black Panel" of experts, mostly fellow writers and comedians (and all black except for that dude who wrote Stuff White People Like). There are plenty of tiny heartbreaking and hackle-raising moments in How To Be Black - race is serious business in America, after all - but the book is also funny as hell.

Explores America's biggest demographic shift since the baby boomers

"Human societies," Eric Klinenberg writes, "at all times and places, have organized themselves around the will to live with others, not alone." Until now, that is. People who live alone make up 28 percent of all U.S.households, and the numbers are even higher in countries like Sweden and Japan. Contemporary solo dwellers are the subject of the NYU sociology professor's Going Solo, which argues... that this particular class of people constitutes the nation's biggest demographic shift since the baby boomers. It's not exactly a modest claim.

So who are these solo dwellers? Mostly women, mostly middle-aged and mostly clustered in metropolitan areas. But numbers tell only a part of the story. People live alone for many reasons, and they don't always live alone voluntarily. Klinenberg gives a smart historical overview of a trend that begins with 18th-century rooming houses and sweeps forward to include milestones like the feminist movement and Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl, which glamorized solo living as a must for young women on the make. ("Roommates," Brown told her readers in 1962, "are for sorority girls. You need an apartment alone, even if it's over a garage.")

Brown herself acknowledged that living alone required fortitude - and indeed, Klinenberg takes a look at the emotional and financial tolls of solo dwelling: the risks of isolation, the difficulties of aging alone and the lack of a domestic safety net. It's not all Carrie-Bradshaw-and-her-closet-of-Manolos out there. Klinenberg does an adroit job of convincing us that there's a real cultural shift underway, and that it has consequences we've only begun to imagine.

Full of inventive insults, but undoubtedly a tribute

In his new memoir, Michael Ian Black passes out in Amsterdam, fantasizes about telling his kids that Santa is fake, and calls his wife an unprintable word that begins with the letter "c." And still, after reading the book's 19 essays, you're convinced that he's a great guy: devoted husband, generous father, moral compass.

Black, known for more than a decade now as a stand-up comic,... screenwriter, pop-culture pundit, and even serious poker player, deftly weaves in and out of his past and present, giving us a memoir-in-essays that's as funny as it is heartfelt. We learn about his father's death, his mother's lesbianism, his wife's ex-boyfriend, and his kids' ceaseless cries. We follow Black from suburban New Jersey to the NYU dorms to first city apartment to Westchester homestead - a trajectory that makes him more than a little self-loathing. As a bohemian-turned-family man, Black spends a lot of time asking himself, "How did I get here?" (the book's epigraph is Talking Heads lyrics). His answers are never definite and always shrewd. Dedicated to his wife, Martha, You're Not Doing It Right, full of inventive insults and backhanded compliments, is undoubtedly a tribute to her. Behind every funny guy, after all, is a great woman: ready to laugh and more than ready to put him in his place.

Combats one-dimensional depictions of life in Indian slums

The "Indian slum" has become a trope in the popular Western imagination, often portrayed as an annoyance or eyesore, or else as a site of unspeakable misery and abjection. In Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo combats these one-dimensional depictions with her empathic story of Annawadi, a slum on the outskirts of Mumbai's international airport. Boo spent four years in Annawadi, getting... to know its residents and their routines, their jobs, their money troubles, their inter-familial tensions and their hopes for the future. We meet Abdul, a seasoned teenage trash-sorter to whom young trash-pickers come to sell their scavenged goods; Manju, the first girl in Annawadi to go to college; and Fatima, a promiscuous, disabled woman known as the "one leg." As Boo explains in her erudite afterword, in the current state of global capitalism, the very poor frequently view themselves in competition with their neighbors for limited resources and for the elusive means to "get ahead." We see this play out in Annawadi, as Manju's mother, Asha, strives to ingratiate herself to corrupt slumlords in order to become a corrupt slumlord herself, and as Fatima's jealousy of Abdul's family's relative wealth leads to a tragedy that irremediably affects them all. We also see moments of friendship, of collaboration, of celebration, and of quiet contemplation. Read expertly by Sunil Malhotra, Boo's nonfiction account of the lives of Annawadians reads like a novel. And, as in the best novels, Boo dignifies her "characters" with the opportunity to be as complex, multidimensional, and ever-changing as they are in real life.

Life lessons from a best-selling screw-up

Who does Augusten Burroughs think he is, writing a how-to guide to life? I mean, after devouring a short-stack of his harrowingly brilliantly hilariously harrowing memoirs like Running with Scissors and A Wolf at the Table, we're well aware of his messed-up past: drugs, alcohol, suicide attempts, all kinds of family issues.

It's true, he's not your average guru. But he is a survivor, and an eloquent (if... unrepentantly blunt) truth-teller. "I am a complete and total fuckup," he writes in the early pages of This Is How, "which is exactly why I'm equipped to write this book and tell you how to live." Chapters include "How to Feel Like Shit," "How to Remain Unhealed," "How to Be a Good Mental Patient," "How to Lose Someone You Love," and a ton more.

While the advice is occasionally abstract, this isn't a book of go-get-'em, hang-in-there aphorisms and time-worn witticisms. Burroughs has no patience for pithy affirmations, willpower or AA. There are some things you get over, and some things you don't, but there's almost nothing you won't get past, he says with the confident, sympathetic countenance of a man who knows a little something about life. "If you hate it, you haven't seen enough of it."

A reporter's eye and a son's heart converge in war-torn Lebanon

It's a little strange, hearing author Anthony Shadid graphically describe the toll a missile exacted on a Lebanese village in House of Stone - strange because one is immediately reminded that Shadid himself died suddenly and much too soon in the Middle East, though he couldn't have known it as he wrote of victims choking on sand and dismembered corpses. Yet if... death continually haunts House of Stone (as a veteran war correspondent, Shadid saw his share of it), the book relentlessly pursues the life that goes on in death's stead and gives it meaning.

House of Stone's narrative concerns the reporter's efforts to rebuild his great-grandfather's house in Marjayoun, Lebanon, which was destroyed by an Israeli rocket in 2006. What comes of this effort is part national saga, part family history, and part tale of a stranger in a strange land. Shadid finds no shortage of amazement at the time and money he puts into a house that the Lebanese think should simply be destroyed. Suppliers cheat him, necessary parts prove difficult to find. He must clean human refuse out of the house's water tanks. Interwoven with Shadid's trials as he attempts to rebuild the house is an account of the histories of his family and their land, and it is here that House of Stone shines most brightly. It is almost as though Shadid, aware of how much of the story is not told by journalists like himself ("Television and the craft I practice show us the drama, not the impact," he writes), now makes his best effort to fill in those spots. The result is a book that leverages Shadid's keen reporter's eye, complementing it with the emotion and in-depth engagement wrung from a family story. It is a tale of history with a heart, grounded in those familial bonds that we all have in common.

A lyrical, charming and sexy recasting of the fall of Troy

Even those who have never read Homer's Iliad are probably familiar with the broad strokes of the Trojan War: Beautiful woman leaves her husband for a foreigner; husband rallies his neighbors to go get her back; fast-forward through 10 years of war, siege and a giant wooden horse; et voila, the Greeks triumph. But it's Achilles, the nearly invincible golden boy of... the Greek army, who is the real star of the show. His famously boundless rage begins the saga, and his vengeful murder of the Trojan prince Hector ends it. Why so angry? Well, it's Hector who kills Patroclus, Achilles' dearest friend, and - as debut novelist Madeline Miller and many other classicists over the years have posited - his lover.

The Song of Achilles, narrated by Patroclus himself, is a very human love story, woven into the greatest military saga of the Western canon. To call it Homeric slash fiction undersells the beauty of Miller's prose and the timeless tragedy of a wartime romance. But that's what it is: a lyrical, charming and, yes, sexy recasting of the fall of Troy. It makes modern sense of the archaic weirdness of the original text, and transforms god-like legends into approachable characters. Helen and Paris, Odysseus and Agamemnon, and even the gods are just side players, watching from the wings as these two young men fall in love. The first-person narration, voiced skillfully by British actor Frazer Douglas, brings these ancient heroes to life in a way that honors the performative tradition of Homer's epic.

Humor, intrigue and the secret life of mechanical bees

Nick Harkaway is a master of wordy, straight-faced silliness. If you want a hint at what you're in for with his marvelous second novel, look no further than the first appearance of the mysterious Rodney Titwhistle and Arvin Cummerbund. "Those are our actual names, I'm afraid. Life is capricious. If you should feel the urge at any time to chuckle, we're both quite big... enough to share the joke." The man they're addressing is our accidental hero Joe Spork, a person who knows a thing or two about name baggage. Being the son of notorious London gangster Matthew Spork doesn't help. (Harkaway, meanwhile, is John Le Carre's kid; read into that what you like.) Joe's attempt at a quiet life - he fixes clocks and other intricate mechanical doodads - gets a spanner in the works when the comically spooky Titwhistle and Cummerbund drop by in search of clues as to the whereabouts of the Angelmaker, a doomsday device of the highest craftsmanship. (You know, the type of rare antiquity that turns up in sleepy London clock shops.)

Suffice it to say this is where the ball gets rolling, with Joe always pursuing one set of enigmatic men while barely dodging another. Soon we've got secret societies, spies, automatons, a swarm of steampunk bees, a Bond-worthy supervillain and one of the funniest, nerdiest and most awkward sex scenes in literary history.

Following up 2008's post apocalyptic The Gone-Away World, Harkaway proves he's just as adept at moving his chess pieces around a still-here world. Thick with deadpan British humor, inventive plot twists and memorable visuals, Angelmaker is a smart, wild, calculated joyride.

Julavits has a facility with words that makes every detail enchanting
Heidi Julavits' The Vanishers begins with a brief, ingenious riff on the campus novel, borrowing that genre's best elements – dry humor, oddball characters, an enclosed habitat – and reimagining them in the context of a rural institute for parapsychology. Parapsychology, in Julavits-land, means telepathy, communications with the dead and other dark arts, all formally taught at the Institute's campus in rural... New Hampshire.
At the Institute we meet our narrator, a 26-year-old student named Julia Severn who serves as an apprentice to a bewitching, perilous professor named Madame Ackermann. And from there, the novel spins a web that goes far beyond the halls of academia. Over the course of her study, Julia makes a discomfiting (and common) discovery: the fact that her mentor, Madame Ackermann, is not all she's cracked up to be. "There was nothing special about this woman I'd idolized, mimicked, and, in my confused way, desired," she finds; "It was even possible that practically anybody - maybe even I - was more gifted than she." Sensing the defection, Madame Ackerman inflicts a psychic injury on the younger woman, resulting in Julia's falling ill with a rainbow of unsolvable ailments. Julia takes a leave of absence from the Institute and packs her bags for Manhattan, where she is swiftly entangled in a spooky plot involving snuff porn, a disfigured skincare heiress, and a Viennese sanatorium."“Spellbinding" is an appropriate word for the plot.
Julavits has a facility with words that makes every detail enchanting, and even dry topics like the weather (a "slushy gruel") and office rugs ("worn of coconut shell fibers and resembling, because of its swirled weave, the hair that collects over a shower drain") become suffused with spookiness, eroticism, or anxiety. As a narrator, Julia Severn is both a complete weirdo and intensely sympathetic, which is both a testament to the author's talents and a reminder that fiction - great fiction - can perform magical feats. Listeners who enjoy carefully-plotted, atmospheric novels (think Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City or Nathaniel Rich's The Mayor's Tongue) will be equally enamored of The Vanishers.

A magical kind of origin story; ultimately one of acceptance

"We are formed by what we desire," writes John Irving on the first page of In One Person, his latest contribution to a lifetime of novels - including The World According to Garp and Cider House Rules - about people with slippery, supercharged sexuality. And thus we spend a good portion of the book learning what formed the desires of the narrator, bisexual... novelist William - known as Billy in his youth - Abbott.

It begins with a flat-chested small-town Vermont librarian who thrusts Dickens on Billy, as well as a cross-dressing grandfather, his youthful, theatrical stepfather, and an intimidating but desirable wrestler private school classmate. Add in an absent father and a stolen bra or two, swirl it in a cauldron with Shakespeare references, and we've got ourselves one magical kind of origin story. And it is one ultimately of acceptance, both from Billy himself and the people around him. That past holds through the rest of the book, especially when we are thrust into a devastating look at the impact of AIDS in the 1980s. In the middle of some truly sad moments, it helps to know that the narrator doesn't loathe himself. His own self-respect guides the reader.

This is, of course, heavy, dense stuff on the page. Irving works every sentence rigorously. But as voiced by the absurdly talented Broadway veteran John Benjamin Hickey (The Big C), this fiercely constructed book goes down smoother. And Hickey's take on an Austrian accent is worth the price of the audiobook alone.

A hippie heaven goes to hell

All utopias fail (seen one around recently?), but the undoing of the titular hippie commune in Lauren Groff's fantastic second novel is exceptionally spectacular and heartbreaking. Of course, there are cracks in Arcadia from the beginning: the endless influx of Frisbee-tossing d-bags, the shady weed deals, the labor disputes, the charismatic guru whose teachings on equality are undermined by his own weaknesses. It's a hot mess.

Still, for... little Bit Stone, the first kid born on this secluded stretch of upstate New York farmland, the place is a verdant wonderland stocked with fresh produce, fresh air, an extended family of oddball characters, and sexual awakenings at every swimming hole. It's also the only home he knows, so when the real world finally drops by to tear Arcadia apart, it's devastating - for Bit, for his wayward crush Helle, for all the dirty ol' bohemians and new-age types who'd worked so hard to build the place, for the readers who'd half-seriously started daydreaming about life off the grid.

Groff, who turned heads with 2008's wonderfully cockeyed family drama The Monsters of Templeton, has built something unassailably beautiful in Arcadia. Her sentences are lush, vivid, sensual things that twist and sprout in surprising but natural directions. Like Bit, the story goes where it goes, leaping forward in years and leaving familiar places for scarier frontiers. And when the world at large seems ready to collapse the way Arcadia did, it's tragic and truthful. Lots of dystopias succeed, after all.

Depicts adolescence as an everyday battle of self-doubt, without moralizing or oversimplifying

Having long ago shown that he's among the most astute children's (as Lemony Snicket) and adult (as himself) writers around, Daniel Handler's 2011 novel is a step between, landing in Young Adult territory. He gets this one right, too: Why We Broke Up - illustrated in the print edition with art by Maira Kalman - depicts adolescence as an everyday battle... of self-doubt and dawning self-knowledge, without moralizing or oversimplifying the emotional guts at its mismatched-just-so characters' hearts. Every new emotion is huge, something Handler renders without hyperbole. (The audiobook is narrated by Khristine Hvam, who nails its tone - jumpy and snotty and cautious all at once.)

Handler's narrator is Min Green, an outsider suburban teenager who valorizes silent film and plans to direct movies herself. (There are a lot of film references, all delightful - "The party surged around us like the panic in Last Train Leaving, the coaches starting off the festivities with their fat, dumpy dance to 'I'm the Biggest Man'" - and all made up.) Her boyfriend is Ed Slaterton, eligible high-school basketball star and math virtuoso, to whom Why We Broke Up is addressed. It's a letter, or series of them, explaining each of the objects in a box she's returned to him to signal their breakup after less than two months together. He's casually cruel; she and her crew are far more highfalutin than his teammates in a game in which Min has absolutely no interest. And as happens to adolescents no less than adults, their hormones overtake them anyway - for a while.

The book is an epic, a supernatural oral tradition infinitely revised.

For a certain subset of readers, call them the proto-bloggers, the long wait for The Sugar Frosted Nutsack has felt excruciating. It was the mid-'90s when cult classicist Mark Leyner released his last novel. Known for his antic prose, free-associative humor and postmodern mind games, Leyner now appears, in retrospect, to have been eerily prescient, his early work like drafts of the... sort of Internet culture we're all now accustomed to.

In The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, we get multiple and recursive narratives: not only the biography of Ike Karton, an unemployed New Jersey butcher, but also the story of the universe's very origin, as well as its eternal pantheon of gods, who no longer get along and spend all their time in Dubai, squabbling on the top floor of a skyscraper and obsessing over Ike's fate.

The book is an epic, a supernatural oral tradition infinitely revised. Its every aside and mistake is part and parcel of what the gods, who are in fact recanting it in real time, intended. Even your reaction to the story - your enthusiasm, your boredom, your break for a snack - has been predetermined.

In the Internet Age, we take infinite scrolling, constant distraction, and the existence of a never-ending collective story as matter of course. In that light, the strangest thing about The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is how un-strange it seems.

A promising collection from a bold new writer

Take Lorrie Moore's wit and combine with Annie Proulx's sparseness, add a dash of Maile Meloy's melancholy, and the result is Emma Straub's captivating debut collection. Though it's a short listen that manages to pack 12 stories into five and a half hours, Straub's characters are fully realized as smart though oftentimes heartbreakingly vulnerable people in search of true connection.
Opening story "Some People Must Really... Fall in Love" sets the tone for the rest of the collection. It concerns a Victorian literature professor with a crush on her 18-year-old student. Franny Gold, whose recurring appearances in the book portray her first as the object of her Barnard roommate's affections, and later, one-half of a dysfunctional marriage, focuses Straub's work around the eternal themes of loneliness, loss and unrequited love. In standout piece "Fly-Over State," Sophie and James move from New York to Madison, Wisconsin, only to find there's too much space, and too much has been forgotten. Sophie, in a line that sounds like it might have been written by Emily Dickinson, thinks about "how each time you moved, you left behind more and more: the antique furniture; the soft, faded T-shirts; the garbage and then the garbage cans themselves, until maybe one day you were left with only what you could carry on your back, and what was packed inside your own skin."
While the Siri-esque quality of Collen Marlo's narration can occasionally offset the humanity of the characters in Other People We Married, it can't hide them completely. It's a beautiful and promising collection by a bold new American writer.

Stories about loneliness, alienation, depression and death in worlds of magical realism

It might seem a bit odd to call Etgar Keret's collection Suddenly, a Knock at the Door a delight. It's 35 stories about loneliness, alienation, depression and death that shoot out at a blistering pace. But there's a disorienting hopefulness to many of them. Narrated by a who's who of literati, artists and actors, including Dave Eggers, Miranda July, Stanley Tucci... and Neal Stephenson, Keret's stories exist in worlds of magical realism. Bodies literally unzip to reveal entirely different people underneath the skin and dreams become portals to new, entirely real dimensions - where life is still unpleasantly banal. These are places in which everything is ordinary and nothing quite makes sense.

Keret is Israeli, and much of Suddenly is an examination of that nation's psyche, battered as it is by suicide bombings, isolation, and ideological division. In "Healthy Start," one of the standouts in this strong collection, the actor Ben Foster narrates the story of Avichai, a man who, after being left by his partner, finds that no one quite seems to know who he is. Mistaken for several other men, he decides to abandon his own identity as easily as others have abandoned him.
For these characters, the more unpleasant parts of life are made simultaneously more and less ordinary compared to the stranger events that befall them. Death is still something terrifying, incomprehensible, and sad, but is it any more so than finding an unpleasant German man inside one's lover? Keret's stories, in all of their sweet distress, say no.

A visceral tale of abandonment and loss in North Korea

As his name might suggest, Pak Jun Do - literally "John Doe" - has a way of slipping in and out of situations with some anonymity. Whether abducting Japanese citizens on a ship or navigating Texas on a diplomatic mission, the recent North Korean military enlistee is given some sobering responsibilities. Jun Do is the son of the director of Long Tomorrows, an... orphan labor camp outside Pyongyang. When Jun Do isn't choosing which boys will eat first, he dreams of his mother, an opera singer who was also stolen away. In his second novel, Adam Johnson skillfully describes a nation we mostly know from newswires. His everyman, Jun Do, is equal parts hero and bystander in a visceral tale of abandonment and loss. But in addition to the horror, there's a hint of the romantic: Jun Do defeats Commander Ga, a rival of Kim Jong-Il, and squires his wife, the beautiful actress Sun Moon.

It comes as a surprise that this painstakingly detailed novel, which was published shortly after Dear Leader's death in December 2011, is written by an American with limited firsthand knowledge of the country's dark landscape. Narrated artfully by the author, with Tim Kang, Josiah D. Lee and James Kyson Lee, The Orphan Master's Son is a nail-biting listen.