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The voice of poet John Tynan has a natural beauty all its own that is both an innate gift and a moral, as well as technical, achievement: fresh, unspoiled, casual and yet artful, never dry or contrived, always freely flowing, and of a sensibility so kind, humorous, and radically open to experience in its immediacy and depth, that it seems an inseparable, innate part of the poet's character; and yet, again and again, in his reflections, in his lyricism, the burden of experience and memory is acknowledged and overcome by a rededication of self to love and life. If there is a lesson in these Lessons for his readers, it may be that spontaneity and immediate joy constitute not merely a state of being, but a creative act of becoming.

The formal playfulness of Christopher Carter Sanderson's novel is visually apparent at a glance. It consists of two parts, each composed of a series of short fragments. The first part, 79/79/'79, has 79 titled sections of 79 words each, and is set in 1979. The second, @1000thenovel, is set in 1980, and consists of roughly 1000 tweets of 140 characters each; the story also has 140 characters. The book is far more, however, than a formalist game. It is a deeply affecting Bildungsroman in which an adolescent explores many different windows into himself and his emerging world, and where the unity and plurality of experience are vividly encountered together. It's a masterful experiment in the best sense, and a deeply affecting story.

Of all of Raymond Smullyan's many books, this perhaps best captures the timeless delight of the casual conversation of this American polymath. A seamless continuum of jokes, stories, puzzles, and reflections, caught in an deliciously unpremeditated arc that nonetheless is remarkably cohesive, it is sparkling and charming proof that cheerfulness need not be incompatible with intelligence, nor pleasure with wisdom.

By a singular ruse, the author of this account obtained entrance to the most exclusive party in the scientific world of the 20th century: The Einstein Centennial Symposium at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, on 14-18 March 1979. Admission was denied to all but a hand-picked group of celebrities: Nobel Prize winners, surviving members of Einstein's family, renowned Einstein scholars and historians, and journalists. Unbeknownst to the organisers of the event, Mr Lisker turned out to be the only journalist present with the scientific competence to cover the entirety of this unique event. The result is a gripping and fascinating story that is both informed and humane, scientifically credible and politically aware.

These poems turns laconic and garrulous, hard-boiled and tender, magnify gaps and unreliabilities in the surface of things through which the depths of an underlying desolation, a nameless existential care, and the mystery of love may be glimpsed; they make a swaying bridge over the abyss of loss. "Number among my umpteen flaws detached glibness", he writes; "Who would disagree that little's glitchless?" What he calls his glibness, transmitted with a compressed but graceful musicality, often attains an unsentimental lyricism all the more touching for its reticence. His audacious imagination and relentless intelligence give rise to a richly ironic humor that is often valedictory, somber, even grim, but never without profound affection and attention.

This is the first volume of the collected stories of Roy Lisker. Written over a period of over sixty years, these works are a significant cross-cutting slice of the vast creative output of this American polymath, a mathematician, political activist, underground journalist, prankster and provocateur, poet, playwright, novelist, artist, composer, and above all, always, man of letters, who has carved out for himself an entirely original and authentic career outside the bounds of conventional institutions and produced a body of work of astonishing vitality and breadth. We regard the publication of these stories, all together for the first time, as an important event in American letters. This volume contains tales of frustrated, ego-mad, and possessed musicians, and depraved and/or misled men of science; two hysterical mathematical spoofs; and culminates in the novella The Governments of Chelm, in which the legendary shtedl of fools grapples with one system of government after another, to no avail.

This is a playful novel set in 2050, when the publishing industry has collapsed, literature has become a micro-niche interest, and Scotland itself has become an enormous call center. Those writers who remain reside in a dilapidated towerblock, where they churn out hack works tailored to please their small audiences. The novel weaves together individual stories of life inside (and outside) the building, where each floor houses a different genre, as the writers fight to keep the process of literature alive with varying degrees of success. The novel is a feast of wit: a surreal entertainment, a bracing satire, a verbal tour de force, and a good-spirited dystopian comedy; it is also a loving homage to language, literature, and the imagination, and a plea that they remain vital well into the dubious future that awaits us.

Jack Foley's autobiography begins, "What is a life but stories?" The stories collected here are not his life but a fantastic consciousness in which he is as lost as anyone. Foley writes what he does not know; he writes what he can imagine. The dead sprout up here as easily as leaves of grass. Stylistically the stories range widely -- some are comic, some bring tears. All manifest "the strangeness and the power of poetry", plunging us into the enigma of the human heart.

Stephen Moles' remarkable novel The Most Wretched Thing Imaginable could be described as any of the following: A modern-day Book of the Dead which uses important events from relatively recent history (such as the Mayerling Incident and the Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 crash) and elements of popular culture (such as the Beatles and Shakespeare) to give expression to the same basic narrative found in all the ancient funerary texts from around the world. A semi-autobiographical novel about the author's work with the Dark Meaning Research Institute and his efforts to stop their ground-breaking parasemantic findings from being appropriated/suppressed by the authorities. A sister publication to Moles' previous novel, Paul is Dead, offering insights into the book's main themes (such as how to create a Möbius-strip-style twist in one's life story and make contact with an alternate self). A poetic work in which the imagery (which has its own grammar and syntax) tells the story instead of the words: the entangled symbols are brought to the fore to such an extent that the reader is able to see the unconscious beneath the partially visible surface narrative and decide on the full literal meaning of it (rather than the other way around, as with all most books, where the literal meaning is made explicit and the underlying meaning remains partially or completely hidden). By whichever corner it is picked up, no matter how gingerly, what will be uncovered is an endlessly inventive and delightful work of wit, ingenuity, personal charm and no little substance.

Fiction. Jacob Smullyan's ERRATA, a series of thirty tiny, enigmatic stories and essays by the author of DRIBBLE, is a text, or so it itself claims in its opening lines, that consists solely of errors. Towards its end, after we have experienced the existential agonies, both climactic and quotidian, of several apparently overlapping characters (S., Z., Sanders, Zander), and drunk innumerable cups (or are they cupolas?) of coffee, it comes to assert that error may be a mode either of revelation or delusion. Which process is at play here? Can we decide? And if, as the text elsewhere states, we can neither seek truth nor illusion, can we seek anything at all--even to exit this maze? Or can we, like another character, only patiently mediate their interminable dispute as a form of prayer, with no purpose, perhaps, other than obedience to fate, or a certain subterranean satisfaction in behaving according to a deep intuition, an inner voice, the only peace we have--or is that another of the book's deliberate errors? Tantalizing, allusive, and harrowing, ERRATA is a meditation on the psychology of scepticism and on the role of art in addressing the essential paradox of suffering and joy.

Poet Joseph Reich writes from a great inner pressure of experience and memory. His senses are open to an America frozen in a forever unconsummated act of rotting; with humor, empathy, and a vast, restless energy, his experience bursts out, capturing the fleeting world in a poetic bubble with an almost painterly repletion, so that for a moment it becomes whole and tangible, authentic both to the outer reality to which it is a touching tribute, and to his own nature.

This darkly humorous collection of short fiction by Charles Holdefer, author of The Contractor and Back in the Game, revolves gracefully around an esoteric and, it goes without saying, entirely fictional account of the imaginary formative years of someone who at times resembles America's most notorious -- so far! -- Vice President. This centre provides a jumping -- off point for free-wheeling, fanciful explorations, both poetic and satirical, into the archaeology of the banality of evil, that reveal, with a light touch and forgiving good humor, the soul-distorting burdens of duty, repression and narcissism in our daily life.

Poetry. Matthew Gasda's gorgeously contrapuntal ORCHID ELEGY is a long poem that, like a fugue, moves at once backwards and forwards, joining an impulse towards restless exploration and budding divagation with an instinct for recapitulation. Its 179 brief numbered sections are held both together and apart by a semantic tensegrity achieved through graceful thematic stratification; each structural node experiences the quality of its own solitude in resonance with an elegiac melos unfolding around and through it. These parcels of finitude, petals like the characters of a play, constantly seek, both in form and in thought, the pattern of a lost Eurydice, even in the shifting, retreating presence of the Other, for the most important category of beauty is the beauty of that which is lost. The spiral of longing persists through love, hunger and death. Yet, something is accomplished, if not necessarily captured, through the turning of this gyre of lament and encomium. Tracing and dissecting through the alchemy of metaphor the form of the beloved, slowly the poem emerges from its secret and consciousness emerges; the poem, or the soul, becomes body, and vice versa, a shared node...transparent-- shining, and with renewed purpose, the elegy of life begins again.

Welcome to Los Alamos, where the big-brained boys and girls are at it again. But atoms have become passé: now its the Higgs boson, which they are using to develop a clean, efficient weapon of mini-destruction, mysteriously dropping bodies and groups of bodies into junior black holes within a fifty mile radius. Moreover, they are accomplishing this perfidy in comic rhyming quatrains. Can an intrepid group of six amateur do-gooders resolve the mystery and prevent the unleashing of this new WMD? With the help of several Doberman pinschers, a vasifactive Kentucky writer and his vivacious muse, Herr Morguemeister, and Verdis Otello, a resolution seems just possible.

Plotless, absurd, nonsensical, arbitrary, silly, mad, ribald, noisy, violent, despairing, obscene, drugaddled, revolting, and hilarious, J F Mamjjasond and Fafnir Finkelmeyer's Hoptime is both an insult to the very idea of a novel and an uncanny magnification of it. In the words of Finkelmeyer, it was for its authors a "kind of scripture" and "something fateful and necessary"; "it was a way, he writes in the Foreword to this edition, "for the two of us to love each other in the only way we could, willingly and totally entwined in each other's foolish, ugly, wise and beautiful fantasies, which we heard, supported and forgave." In the end, this colorful romp of two outrageous souls lost together in a sort of infinite poetic and imaginative wilderness is not only explosively funny, but moving; the reader, too, is freed into the intimacy and deep silence of a vast inner space, and finds in that solitude one is not alone.

JRZDVLZ, by Lee Klein, author of The Shimmering Go-Between, is the autobiography of a sympathetic monster on a centuries-spanning quest for redemption. Based on long-suffering legend and historical fact, its about the sacrifice, civility, endurance, and humility required to transform a monster into a man.

The young roughnecks in LORDS OF THE SCHOOLYARD, best friends since eighth grade, smell the roses in their own way: tormenting and manipulating smaller kids, sassing teachers, throwing smoke bombs, and sneaking cigarettes in the school bathroom. They may be outcasts, unable to fit in or to follow rules, but they never take it lying down; instead, they take it out on others. Stark, brutal, at times darkly humorous, and written in a powerfully pared-down style purged of any ostentation, Hamilton's story is told from the point of view of one such antisocial bully. The effect of identification with a character so blithely inconsiderate of his own cruelty is exquisitely uncomfortable, even shocking, and captures with unforgettable force the anomie and amoralism of the adolescent mind, as well as the fundamental, sorrowful human innocence that lies beneath it. This harrowing immersion into the inner reality of a little boy who chooses victimization over victimhood casts an all-too-timely light on contemporary society in 2017.

These "insomniac episodes" consist of 84 tantalizing descriptions of hallucinated Magritte murals, painted on the inside of poet Joseph Reich's sleepless eyelids. Strongly visual but leaving much to the imagination, humourous, and deliciously paradoxical, they make a delightful introduction to Reich's wryly obsessive way of shaking off the downpour of the world's insanity.

Laura Davenport's poetic and harrowing "An Occasional History" investigates how language and a person's place within it come to be defined in the context of an abusive relationship -- one whose terrible violence is ever so gradually revealed, as layers of language and forgetting are progressively peeled away. Through five sections of differing form, in which romance novels, the OED, and etymological histories play prominent roles, we approach the core of knowledge step-by-step, and come to experience not merely abuse and its ramifications, but the central role in it of how language is shaped by power relations, and vice versa. Formally unique, acutely painful yet uplifting, and exquisitely written in every detail, this collection sustains an almost magical double perspective: a deeply knowing aesthetic distance and hard-won wisdom, and an intimate, willing identification with the immediate, almost to the point of being lost within it. As in all great writing, language and soul interrogate themselves through the power of poetry.

In this dazzling cycle of poems, Doug Nufer, wizardly author of poetry and prose works based on formal constraints, starts with a simple constructive rule, exemplified by its title: present a sequence of letters, grouped into a word or words; follow it by the same sequence, differently grouped; repeat. This foundational principle, ruthless in its purity, gives rise, like a jazzy passacaglia, to the most diverse forms, whose endless variations murder and reproduce like cellular automata creeping across the page. In the mind and ear of the reader, meanings, rhythms and sounds burst into dizzying presence and are swept away with ebullient panache. Nufer's art here is a high-energy high-wire act of wit, joining formal severity with frivolity and making stops at all points in between. Don't be afraid, Reader, to take the local and spend some time on this tour, bar-hopping with your precise yet whimsical guide across an initially alien but ultimately friendly and stimulating spaceyou will end up welcoming the cheerful pop of your newly effervescent brain exploding.

Every so often a novel appears that demands a paradigm shift, that redefines what literature is and what its powers may be. This is such a work. A novel of seemingly modest dimensions, it relates, in scrupulously direct, clear, and naturalistic prose, a story of the tense reunion of two old friends in a Maine bar. That story, and the stories nested within it, while fascinating, are hardly melodramatic; not much happens of more consequence than the refilling of a beer glass. And yet, by the novels conclusion, the reader will be faced with a dilemma as unexpected and perplexing as any thriller could provide, and as piercing, substantial and profoundly involving as anything in the work of literatures great psychologists. The first reading of this book is an unforgettable, shocking surprise; and each re-reading brings new rewards.

Sean Kilpatrick may be the P.G. Wodehouse of Hell. The blistering anger of his deliciously delirious rants delivers more cathartic mirth than provocation, and the ever-present poetic invention and subtly tidy thematic organization hiding in plain sight behind the ultra-violence inflicted on reader, characters, language and meaning suggest, in the end, a graceful and always musical accommodation to form. In this faux sequel to a Steven Seagal movie written in 80s Shakespeare, cultural icons Laurie Anderson, Michael Jackson, Sir William Forsythe, and assorted other henchmen and hemi-demi-semi-deities demean and demolish themselves and each other as they trace out, perhaps inadvertently but certainly hilariously, the delicate arc of a love story.

On June 4th, 2016, poet Jack Foleys wife, Adelle Foley, who was (as she told her doctor) never sick, was diagnosed with stomach cancer; she died on June 27th. They had been married for nearly fifty-five years and were an exceptionally close couple. Adelle was also a poet and, like Jack, had published widely. He wrote about her, How can there be sunlight and you not in it? In the months after her death, with extraordinary courage and directness, Jack opened his heart with a series of poems and letters to his friends, many of whom responded with poems of their own. These documents of intense necessity, brought together, make up the deeply moving collection that is Grief Songs: an expression, certainly, of a year of desperate grief, but more essentially, of a lifetime of love.

The uncanny obstinacy of Colin James poems in Resisting Probability lingers like an elusive aftertaste, a sense of raw, stunted assertion and material finality both incomplete and unchangeable. This is we feel how things are, as we settle into the Jamesian groove: whimsical, laconic, gnomic, with a strange resilience of their own no matter how gnarled in form. What feels most solid, though, may not be things themselves, or what is said, but the unsettling edge of silence around them, with a hint of something a little dangerous, but funny too. We learn to take it like it is: When these are moved / to the center of the room / things dont improve.

The sapient roaches of our planetary future, when they seek to understand the sickening dismay, abysmal grief and goofy absurdity of the Anthropocene in Donald Trumps America, will reach for their dog-eared (or bug-horned) copies of Aaron Anstetts Please State the Nature of Your Emergency. In these impossibly crystalline poems, Anstett has distilled from the ironic bile of our vast, unbearable tragedy the steely essence of our predicament.