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William T. Vollmann's 2005 novel Europe Central was a masterpiece. His latest work, a collection of ghost stories entitled "Last Stories and Other Stories" is flabby and cliched.

Gil Scott-Heron's posthumously published memoir, The Last Holiday, is a triumphant and moving account of a life dedicated to art and activism.

The second novel in Hilary Mantel's trilogy positions Thomas Cromwell as Henry VIII's trusted consigliere and a specialist at getting unwanted wives out of the way. But if the machinations in Bring Up the Bodies are of the cruelest kind, Mantel's language couldn't be more sublime.

Laurie Foos' gently surreal new novel is set in a small lakeside town where the local mothers bake their secret confessions into moon pies, which they feed to a silent, mysterious blue-skinned girl.

Mary Norris has been a copy editor at The New Yorker since 1978. She dispenses some of the collected grammatical wisdom of those decades in a new book, Between You & Me (and it is "me," not "I").

Author Miroslav Penkov's new book is a bittersweet, slightly magical history of his native Bulgaria, complete with cross thieves, tragic lovers and a young man who buys the corpse of Lenin on eBay for his Communist grandfather.

When divorced Tony Webster receives an unexpected inheritance, he's pulled back into the past, to the end of his first relationship and the boyhood friend who picked up where he left off. Barnes tells a quietly devastating tale of memory, aging, time and remorse in The Sense of an Ending.

Ron Rash's latest collects 34 of his best short stories; critic Alan Cheuse says they're searingly beautiful, "as if someone has taken a stick from a blazing fire and pressed it into your hand."

In Yu Hua's new novel, a recently dead man decides to attend his own funeral and ends up wandering a strange sort of afterlife, full of characters whose stories reflect the troubles of modern China.

David Crist's The Twilight War is a realistic — and often pessimistic — analysis of America's relationship with Iran. Crist covers decades of policy and history, while balancing this military and diplomatic detail with concern for humanity in his narratives.