In her latest collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Knopf), Russell traffics in her now-trademark wit. In eight tightly drawn stories, she imagines fantastical worlds that stem from the bleakest realities.

The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (Ecco), Ethan Rutherford’s fine debut collection, is part realism, part satire, part historical reclamation, and part dystopian prophecy. Of the eight stories in this collection, half tread in domestic realism, while half, give or take, are tales of survival.

Over the course of these stories, a conviction emerges: faith and lust are not unalike.

Julie Wu’s debut novel, The Third Son (Algonquin), depicts the struggles of a Taiwanese boy, Saburo Tong, to escape his impoverished, cruel background and to establish a meaningful adult life for himself, a journey that takes him from poverty and oppression in Taiwan to the opportunity and relative freedom of 1950s America.

How does an abused and manipulated child return to normal life? Sheri Joseph’s Where You Can Find Me.

James Pinto on André Aciman’s new novel, Harvard Square, “a book about the process of remembering.”

Flannery + Robert Forever? Ellen Prentiss Campbell on Carlene Bauer’s debut novel, a fantasy epistolary between two literary icons.

Louisa Hall’s debut novel, The Carriage House, works through the tensions children face in a family that values tradition over individual autonomy, while speaking to the dilemma of writing from—and reading about—the perspective of characters who are privileged.

“Nostalgia, of course, is the most powerful form of lust: portable as your memories, infinitely rechargeable, and impossible to slake.” Dan Keane reviews James Salter’s new novel, All That Is.

J.T. Bushnell reviews Benjamin Lytal’s coming-of-age debut novel, “a vision of youth from the inside.”