It's the story of Colville and Francine, each around 30 years old and former childhood friends. Francine has married, and is expecting her first child in suburban Boise, Idaho. Colville lives in a trailer but turns up on Francine's doorstep when a news story about a neighbor's missing child mysteriously inspires him to seek her out.

What Colville and Francine share, and what Francine's apprehensive husband, Wells, can begin to fathom, is their past as members of a reclusive religious sect planning for the imminent end of the world. Francine's father helped build the underground compound where the sect expected to ride out a nuclear holocaust, and Colville's beloved younger brother was regarded as a chosen one, destined for some great mission. (Instead, he became a soldier and was killed in Afghanistan.) How exactly the sect fell apart is revealed gradually, and the novel's action culminates in striking passages describing a visit to the groups now-deserted subterranean shelter.

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A ferocious portrait of creative and spiritual frustration, "The Woman Upstairs" begins by linking Nora's fury to her gender, a connection reinforced by the name she shares with the heroine of Ibsen's "A Doll's House." "It was supposed to say 'Great Artist' on my tombstone," she explains, "but if I died right now it would say 'such a good teacher/daughter/friend' instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL. Don't all women feel the same?"

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Laura Miller, who generally does not have “patience for the touchstones of foodie literature,” was pleasantly surprised by Michael Pollan’s “Cooked,” written from the perspective of a journalist and gardener rather than a celebrity chef:

His effort to deepen his understanding of the process of turning food into meals is the subject of his latest book, “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.” I wish I could say “Cooked” is entirely free of moments of flabby philosophizing (“Isn’t it always precisely when we are most at risk of floating away on the sea of our own inventions and conceits that we seem to row our way back to the firm shore that is nature?”), but they are rare. Admittedly, the book’s thematic structure is also a shade precious. It’s divided into four sections according to what the ancients perceived to be the four elements — fire, water, air and earth — each attributed to a different cooking method — grilling, braising and other forms of cooking in liquids, baking and fermentation. As ever, Pollan makes each of these themes the occasion for real thought as well as some energetic reporting.

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John Keating's narration of Jim Crace's "Harvest" falls into the latter category. His eminently pleasant voice, with an Irish lilt that he turns up and down at will, is more or less the same whatever book he's reading. In the case of "Harvest," a deceivingly simple account of the implosion of a small rural community, it is exactly the right voice to convey a story with some of the qualities of a fairy tale. Small things here have big meanings, and Keating, who imparts the flavor of a bedtime story to the proceedings, adds to the novel's archetypal resonance.

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This was 2010. Nico had agreed to produce the screenplay version of my first novel, Stuck Outside of Phoenix -- a screenplay I hadn’t started yet -- and he was no doubt concerned about what I might hand over. I’d never written a screenplay, but with more than a decade of daily writing under my belt, I felt I had what it took to crank out a feature-length version of my own novel. Still, I bought a copy of Story as insurance. It lingered in a pile of books for a few months, and after the first draft of the screenplay was finished, I sold it back.

Flash forward to the summer of 2012. The movie version of Stuck Outside of Phoenix is in the can, and I’m officially a big shot. I’ve taken to wearing sunglasses at night, and I’m looking into changing my name to Hollywood. The writing of Stuck the screenplay had come so easily I’d already knocked out a draft of the screenplay of my second novel, Ghost Notes. I passed this on to a friend, Los Angeles film editor Josh, and I waited impatiently for his comments, wondering if he was aware of all the money we were losing by not taking this thing straight into production.

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I’ve spilled coffee on my shirt.

Do you own any clothes that aren’t stained?

I must. Stuff I haven’t worn, probably. Do you have any club soda? If I act now I can save this shirt.

Why are you such a slob?

I’m really not a slob. I just get excited. What is that?

Seltzer.

Fine, that’ll work.

Is there a difference?

Salt? I don’t really know. Minerals? Salt minerals?

How’s the writing going?

Really?

Do you write on a computer, or by hand? Not that anyone cares.

I write by hand on a computer.

I read somewhere that you often revise your fiction.

That’s true.

Isn’t that cheating?

Excuse me?

You get to work on what you say to make it sound good. Most of us, in our daily lives, don’t.

I see your point.

Yet even with all the time in the world, this thing you’ve done here is a piece of garbage.

That bad?

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Laura Miller was impressed by Kate Atkinson's "Life After Life," in which protagonist Ursula Todd "lives any number of lives in the course of the book," à la Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day":

As a result, “Life After Life” runs through several courses of Ursula’s story until each comes to its terminus, then the novel starts over with a different one. Perhaps this sounds monotonous, like some hellish video game in which you’ve got to repeat a level again and again to make it to the next. That’s not the case. “Life After Life” is a hypnotic dance of causality and chance, in which Ursula makes genuine progress. We see how a meek Ursula’s life plays out when one of her boorish older brother’s friends casually rapes her in the back stairway, and then we get the version in which she’s seized with a powerful urge to clock him the minute he gets fresh. Each iteration shows her to be more self-possessed, more in charge of her own life (as the cliché goes) — but that doesn’t necessarily lead to a “better” outcome. Meanwhile, Ursula moves toward that inevitable time-traveler imperative, the one that gave its name to a “Doctor Who” episode: “Let’s Kill Hitler.”

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Or so I thought until I stumbled upon Guy Gavriel Kay's "Under Heaven," a bewitching tale set in the invented country of Kitai, which is closely patterned after Tang Dynasty China. It was a meeting shaped by audiobooks, since what I was looking for when I found it was a long multi-character story read by my favorite narrator, Simon Vance. Vance has taken me through a dozen books by Anthony Trollope, the entire "A Dance to the Music of Time" sequence by Anthony Powell and miscellaneous other novels by Dickens, Hilary Mantel and V.S. Naipaul. To my ear, he strikes exactly the right balance between distinct characters and the unified sensibility of a third-person omniscient narrator. When I crave the pleasure of being entirely enveloped in the imaginary world of a long novel, I want Vance to read it to me.

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I spoke with the author, who teaches at Agnes Scott College in Georgia, about the differences between her short fiction and her novel, the technological paradigm shifts with short stories, and her abiding passion for comedian Nick Kroll.

How do these stories differ aesthetically from your novel?

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Ursula Todd, the novel's main character, lives any number of lives in the course of the book. It's as if the providential force that commandeered Bill Murray's Feb. 2 in "Groundhog Day" has taken over her entire existence. She is stillborn in an English country house in 1910, or the doctor arrives on time and she survives. She drowns with her big sister, Pamela, during a seaside holiday at age 4, or they are both rescued by an amateur painter. She falls out a window the next year or, eluding that fate, succumbs to the influenza epidemic of 1918. Her various possible means of demise include domestic violence, the Blitz, suicide and a stroke. No wonder Atkinson gave her heroine a name that means "death" in German; the downside of getting a seemingly infinite number of chances at life is having to die an equal number of deaths.

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On the face of it, this thesis seems impossible to refute. But I'm going to try.

It does go without saying that fiction writers ought to be reading, and most of us do, naturally. But I feel as though the particular course of action that Chaon is suggesting — immersing oneself in the world of contemporary literary fiction — is, potentially, a recipe for hackneyed, insular, boring writing.

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Serena, who has been earlier established as a certain type of hungry but unintellectual reader, dismisses this device as a "trick" to be "distrusted." "There was, in my view," she observes, "an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honor. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on authorial whim."

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" 'The Recipe Box,' set to be published in July by Hyperion, tells the story of Grace D'Angelo, a single mother who returns to her hometown in Wisconsin after her best friend dies of breast cancer. The book chronicles Grace's attempt to come to terms with questions surrounding her daughter's paternity and the identity of her own father, and to fortify her relationship with her rebellious teenager. Along the way, she finds love with Mike Lund, a "muscular" teacher and volunteer firefighter with 'curly brown hair and deep gray eyes.' "

Although the source insits "it is just that—fiction," the WSJ has caught on to some uncanny similarities between the life of Grace D'Angelo and Mike Lund and that of Lee and Cuomo's. Namely:

Both Lee and D'Angelo own white cockatoos:

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Laura Miller, a Yankee, was enlightened by former newspaper reporter Tracy Thompson's deeply personal account of the transformation of Georgia, titled "The New Mind of the South":

Thompson gives "The New Mind of the South" a muscular tension that a merely nostalgic memoir or a self-effacing work of reportage could never achieve. She vividly recalls the embracing evangelical church life of her 1960s youth, when the religion was "otherworldly and apolitical" and therefore a marked contrast to the activist fundamentalism that arose in the 1970s or the show-bizzy extravaganza of a megachurch she visits in suburban Atlanta. Yet the latter, an outpost of the "prosperity gospel," turns out to be more multiracial and feminist than she expected. Such churches can’t provide her with the comfort she once found in the small church where her family used to worship, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t doing some good.

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The framing device of this novel is a self-help manual, but it's easy to make way too much of that. Hamid pretends to tell "you," a young man born in a poor village in what appears to be Pakistan, advice on how to parlay "your" natural talents into wealth amid a society of breathtaking ruthlessness and striving. Of course, chances are close to nil that you are such a person, or that you've picked up this book looking for any such advice. Rather, the self-help feint allows Hamid to smoothly adopt the second-person -- a writerly choice that usually registers as painfully self-conscious or presumptuous (see: "Bright Lights, Big City").

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Born a solicitor's daughter in the West Midlands of England in 1913, educated at Oxford, serving in the Women's Royal Naval Service during World War II and working for much of the rest of her life at the International African Institute in London, Pym was a quintessential middle-class Englishwoman, much like her idol, Jane Austen. Like Austen, Pym wrote comedies of manners about the members of her own class, modeling the characters on people she knew. Her novels are populated by vicar's wives, dotty unmarried sisters living in rural villages, holders of mid-level office jobs in sleepy London concerns and assorted anthropologists (based on the ones she met at the institute).

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Much of my investigation for GQ hinged on finding some record of a girl left dead in a dumpster in the summer of 1985. She was a teenage hitchhiker, and I had been there when her body was found. Two days later, a truck driver picked me up hitchhiking and led me to believe that he had killed her. He then pulled over to the side of the road, took out a huge knife and told me to get into the back of the truck—he was going to kill me. I was able, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, to escape into the woods. But I did not go to the police. I did not go for help. These were also some of the questions I was exploring through my essay.

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