Newly Released Books

Two eerie story collections and two comic novels are part of this month’s crop, along with an anthology that has science writers aiming to explain, well, everything.

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THE MINIATURE WIFE AND OTHER STORIES
By Manuel Gonzales
304 pages. Riverhead Books. $26.95.

Usually it’s a good thing when a book is unforgettable. But Mr. Gonzales’s stories in this debut collection are so disturbing, you might wish to empty your brain of them more readily. In one of the more scarring tales, “Pilot, Copilot, Writer,” a plane circles the Dallas airport for 20 years. “As the years passed, I learned to pick out details, as if I were a hawk or an owl,” our narrator says, “I got to where I could see my parents’ house, my wife’s mother’s house, the church where my wife remarried.” In the title story a man accidentally shrinks his wife to coffee-mug size. One day he comes home to find her with a shrunken colleague of his in the dollhouse bedroom. Husband and wife become homeowner and pest; it’s war, and he’s unnerved when she disappears for a while. Surely there’s a metaphor here; but the delightful freakishness is enough.

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THE DEATH OF BEES
By Lisa O’Donnell
311 pages. Harper. $25.99.

One day in Glasgow a 15-year-old girl named Marnie notices the neighbor’s dog digging a body part out of her yard. “Fortunately,” she says, “no one was around and I was able to replant the arm.” The arm belonged to her father, an addict who molested her and eventually her 12-year-old sister, Nelly. Their mother hanged herself the day after he was found dead. Nelly suspects that Marnie smothered him with a pillow. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as far as Nelly is concerned. Afraid of foster care, they break out their shovels. It’s an overly convenient plot point that there’s a lonely, elderly man next door, mourning the death of his longtime boyfriend, and he takes an interest in the girls. But Ms. O’Donnell is pretty disciplined with the sentimentality. In this first novel she pulls off the unusual pairing of grisly and touching.

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TRUTH IN ADVERTISING
By John Kenney
308 pages. Touchstone. $24.99.

This is a novel about working in contemporary advertising, so here’s the obligatory “Mad Men” comparison: The protagonist, Finbar Dolan, is Don Draper stripped of all his glamour, success and pomade. What Fin, a midlevel copywriter, does have on Don is a sense of humor, which he often trains on himself. “Our commercials have cartoon animals or talking germs,” he says. “It’s the stuff you see and think, Blessed mother of God, what idiot did that?” Mr. Kenney, who worked as a copywriter in New York for 17 years, is funny enough about the absurdities of this world to compensate for his obvious theme of finding authenticity. Framed around a surprisingly sweet romance, as well as Fin’s eventual confrontation with his painful family history, this debut offers a pleasing lightness-to-heart ratio.

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GOOD KIDS
By Benjamin Nugent
211 pages. Scribner. $23.

Josh Paquette is 15 and with his dad in the grocery store when they bump into his colleague and her daughter, Khadijah. When the grown-ups break off, the kids spy on them kissing in the candy aisle from underneath a display table, and a bond is forged. Josh announces: “Your mom dresses Republican. That’s one of those lady blazers.” She answers back: “Your dad dresses like a homeless person. He’s in public, but he’s wearing sweat pants.” Khadijah moves to another town soon after but never vacates his fantasies. Thirteen years later Josh is living in Los Angeles, engaged to the charismatic host of an animal TV show, when Khadijah resurfaces. There’s not a lot unexpected here, but in this banter-heavy first novel Mr. Nugent shows how the 20s can be every bit as disorienting as the teenage years.

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REVENGE
Eleven Dark Tales
By Yoko Ogawa
162 pages. Picador. $14.

If creepy were a place, Ms. Ogawa has come up with many ways to get there. A craftsman is commissioned to make a satchel for a woman’s heart that is — stay with me — outside her body, but he wants to keep the bag’s intended contents for himself. A beautician’s visit to a museum of torture devices is a little too inspiring. And a writer befriends her elderly landlady who grows carrots in her garden that look like “amputated hands with malignant tumors”and gives neck massages that are surprisingly strong. “It was as though she were massaging me with her bones,” the woman says. Even while punctuated by such macabre flourishes Ms. Ogawa’s book maintains its restraint, like a dark alley that’s too quiet, or an insane person acting too calm.  

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THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING
Edited by John Brockman
411 pages. Harper Perennial. $15.99.

Mr. Brockman, the editor and publisher of Edge.org, asked the thinkers in his online science community to share their favorite “deep, elegant or beautiful” explanation. What sounds like a canned conversation starter at a dinner party of geeks ends up yielding a handy collection of 150 shortcuts to understanding how the world works. Elegance in this context means, as the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins writes, the “power to explain much while assuming little.” While some offerings can be incomprehensible (including the one entitled “Why Is Our World Comprehensible?”), others keep it simpler. Marcel Kinsbourne, a professor of psychology at the New School, describes how good ideas surface. Philip Campbell, editor in chief of Nature, tackles the beauty of sunrises. Among the things this book will teach you? How much you don’t know.
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