Ann Beattie's sparkling collection The State We're In: Maine Stories contains a story entitled "Yancey," after the narrator's dog. An IRS man visits, inquiring about the narrator's writing room--is it a valid tax deduction? In their exchange, he asks the woman for a poetry recommendation, and she responds by reciting her favorite James Wright poem, "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota." In it, Wright reflects upon what's around him: a butterfly, the sound of cowbells, the droppings of last year's horses. As the evening comes a chicken hawk floats over, looking for a home. His last line is, "I have wasted my life."

Beattie hasn't wasted her life writing stories. This elegiac story gives us a hint about what's important to her in narratives. The 15 entries in this collection primarily feature women and are set in Maine. From story to story, characters are introduced, disappear and then pop up again. Readers start to become familiar with them, comfortable. "The Fledging" is a short, delicate piece about a woman trying to help a baby bird. In "The Little Hutchinsons" a wedding is ruined by the groom falling off a cliff and injuring himself. "The Stroke" is about an elderly couple "who love to bitch at each other" complaining about their kids.

In the end, these carefully drawn, minutely illustrated portraits of women--and men--depict slices of life in all its complexity. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

It's every Millennial's nightmare: newly married, no employment available at home, you move to the city and live in meagerly furnished sublets, repeatedly applying for entry-level admin jobs. Such is the fate of Josephine and Joseph in Helen Phillips's first novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat. Sitting across the desk from a "faceless" interviewer whose "skin bore the same grayish tint as the wall behind... [and] the genderless gray suit," Josephine begins a vaguely defined data-entry job at a massive building labeled with an A superimposed over a Z. When Joseph also finds a low-level clerical job, they convince themselves that they can get by with candle-lit take-out dinners and young lovers' optimism. They toast their good fortune with chipped coffee mugs: "To bureaucrats with boring office jobs." Then matters devolve.

Precisely and concisely, Phillips (And Yet They Were Happy) chronicles the mind-numbing drudgery of Josephine's daily processing of files: "Her forearms ached, her jaw was permanently clenched, her eyes felt dusty. Yet she did what she had to do." She interacts only with a nameless superior she calls "The Person with Bad Breath" and ditsy employee Trishiffany (parents couldn't decide between Trisha or Tiffany) from the Department of Processing Errors who, ominously, knows everything about Josephine's personal life. An urban thriller mash-up of Kafka and the SyFy channel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a frightening look at paranoia and dehumanizing work. Thankfully, Phillips tempers this bleakness with the youthful confidence of Joseph and Josephine, who still find an occasional "pocket of cheerfulness... [and] newfound gratitude." All is not yet lost. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

Glamour magazine books editor Elisabeth Egan has recommended great reads for years. With A Window Opens, Egan is now sure to become a highly recommended author in her own right.

Alice Pearse has three beautiful children, a sexy husband, a sweet but neurotic family dog and a fulfilling part-time job as an editor at You, a women's magazine. Life is comfortable, sweet and safe. Then her husband, Nicholas, learns his law firm has no intention of offering him a partnership and decides to hang his own shingle. Panicked at the loss of Nick's income and the cost of starting an independent practice, Alice realizes she must quit You and find a full-time job.

After a few dead-end leads, Alice lands a position as a content manager at a hot new startup called Scroll. A subsidiary of giant retail corporation MainStreet, Scroll plans to "reinvent the bookstore experience" by offering physical stores where customers will browse e-books instead of hardbacks, lured in by the promise of cushy reading lounges complete with leather armchairs and foot massages.

Egan offers a gentle but telling look at a time when having it all often means doing too much, and crossing the line between working mother and overworking mother is all too easy. She has given readers a heroine who could be anyone's best friend as well as written a first-rate satire of big retail's attempt to roll books into the pervasive one-stop shopping, one-size-fits-all mentality. Alice's open window will give readers a breath of fresh air. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

The End of All Things is the sixth entry in John Scalzi's acclaimed Old Man's War series. Originally published as four novellas in e-book form, The End of All Things expands Scalzi's science fiction universe in a way that will satisfy fans while remaining approachable for new readers. The new print installment centers chiefly on its protagonists' struggle to protect the fragile peace established in the previous books between the human-run Colonial Union and the Conclave--best thought of as a more effective but divisive United Nations, with alien species substituting for nation-states. A group known as Equilibrium has set out to disrupt both the Colonial Union and the Conclave by pitting them against each other.

The End of All Things breaks no new ground for the series, nor does it do much to push past traditional science fiction tropes. However, the novel stands out thanks to Scalzi's likable characters and hilarious, whip-smart dialogue. A little like a space-bound Aaron Sorkin, Scalzi gets tremendous mileage out of having humans and aliens cleverly jaw at each other about complex, but accessible, political dilemmas. The Old Man's War series has been presented as military science fiction in the tradition of Robert Heinlein and Joe Haldeman, but Scalzi prefers a middle ground between the bone-weary pacifism of the latter and the militant philosophizing of the former. More importantly, Scalzi emphasizes fun over lectures, and consequently The End of All Things is best enjoyed as another breezy read in a much-loved series. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

"My rubble and junk filled me with corrosive dismay; but I couldn't bring myself, couldn't bear, to make changes to them. I had boundary issues--with everything, material and emotional." Writer and performer Barry Yourgrau (Haunted Traveller) is the titular mess; his living space is only his worst symptom. Motivated by his girlfriend's ultimatum, he begins what would become a two-year project to clean out his apartment and write about the experience.

In his transient childhood, dominated by his anxious, narcissistic father, Yourgrau became possessive and private about his inner life and his material belongings. Later, he infused memorabilia with intense emotions. And like so many people, he kept junk because it "might still be useful someday... you never knew" or "it might be fixable--you never knew."

Mess is not a self-help book, but those who struggle with extreme clutter or know someone who does are likely to find fresh insights here. Yourgrau tries on most of the theories and treatments available. He interviews experts, researches hoarders, clutterers and collectors, and makes lively characters out of everyone in his life, approaching them and himself with fondness and keen perception. His prose can be awkward at times ("I chew on my porky baguette and his words."), but his blustering charm, self-awareness, anxieties and dramatizing, his many colorful stories and his gradual, jittering progress, make for a funny, affecting and mildly suspenseful read. In the end there is no miraculous transformation--Yourgrau cleans up his life while remaining very much himself. --Sara Catterall

In The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream, a memoir of two concurrent paths, Katharine Norbury aims to find a river's source and to discover her own. She is mourning a recent miscarriage and the loss of her father, taking solace with her mother and her daughter, Evie. Norbury was adopted, and all she knows of the woman who abandoned her at a convent is a name. Neil M. Gunn's novel The Well at the World's End inspires her to walk a waterway from the sea to the source, as does Gunn's protagonist. But Norbury's journey is clearly also metaphorical, a search for herself and her roots.

The route she chooses is not specific: with Evie, she walks parts of several waterways, eventually setting more precise goals along the way, and reaching for Gunn's work when her plans falter. Her expedition to find her biological family proves to be more challenging, intersecting her pathway upriver, from the location she has discovered is her birthplace.

Norbury's seeking is set in Britain, and The Fish Ladder doubles as an amateur naturalist study of the country's flora and fauna. She shares her insecurities and questions alongside Celtic folk tales about salmon traveling upriver to the places of their birth. Her story wanders, but in the end makes emotional and profound ventures into landscape, the importance of place and the very real connections between physical and interior voyages. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina tore through the South, breaking the levees built to protect New Orleans, and leaving 80% of the city underwater. In Katrina: After the Flood, Gary Rivlin (Broke, USA) writes a riveting account of the disastrous results of the storm, starting from the preliminary evacuations to the present day. He investigates the key players in city government who were involved in the clean-up process, and interviews ordinary people whose homes and businesses were destroyed by the flooding, requiring them to relocate to other cities and find new jobs.

Rivlin describes in great detail the destruction Katrina left behind: experts figured that 250 billion gallons of water covered the city and "created an estimated 50 million cubic yards of storm-related debris"; one-quarter of New Orleans's police cars, 200 city transit buses, more than half its fire engines and a significant number of ambulances were destroyed, all of which thwarted rescue efforts. Rivlin shows that efforts to aid those desperate for help were hindered by racial prejudices in the region, with white politicians giving little thought to the black communities destroyed by Katrina. He skillfully blends personal comments with investigative journalism, presenting readers with a well-rounded view of the social, economic and emotional impact the storm had on hundreds of thousands, in the first days after the hurricane and over the ensuing decade. In the end, Rivlin advocates for radically different practices to be instituted long before a new storm arrives. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Environmental attorney David Boyd doesn't believe the enduring myth that environmental protection and economic well-being are mutually exclusive, and provides a bounty of evidence from around the world to support his perspective. Boyd begins and ends with what interests even the most calloused: whales, bald eagles, peregrine falcons and other species once thought nearly extinct that have rebounded as a result of changes in environmental policy, as well as species that have survived terrible damage to their ecosystem, like sea otters and sockeye salmon.

While the thought of animals thriving is heartwarming, Boyd reassures even hardened pessimists that the environmental impact of renewable energy, electric transportation, cradle-to-cradle products, organic agriculture and circular economies is also profitable. Throughout the world, even less-developed countries are finding ways to shrink their global footprint, while Scandinavian countries are continually searching for ways to improve their already impressive efforts toward minimizing their impact on the earth.

Boyd is convinced that a shift from a consumer-based, stuff-obsessed society toward one that values experiences like spending time outside with friends and family is well underway. He includes many ways to promote environmentally responsible lifestyles: sharing goods and services, supporting institutions committed to green ideals, traveling emissions-free, building sustainable structures and eating less (or no) meat, to name a few. The more "ecologically literate" we become, and the more we understand our interdependence on natural systems for basic needs--air, water, food, medicine, shelter--the less we will underestimate our individual role and impact. --Kristen Galles from Book Club Classics

Francine Poulet is an endearing, just-tough-enough grown-up character who springs from the Mercy Watson chapter-book series by two-time Newbery Medal winner Kate DiCamillo (The Tale of Despereaux, Flora & Ulysses). In Francine Poulet Meets the Ghost Raccoon, the second early chapter book in the Tales from Deckawoo Drive series, the renowned animal control officer confirms that her confidence can be shaken but not stirred.

Francine Poulet is "the Gizzford County record holder for most animals controlled," whether bear, snake, bat or fish. So when she gets a call from Mrs. Bissinger on Fleeker Street about a shimmery "ghost raccoon," Francine responds authoritatively: "There are no ghosts. And there are no ghosts of raccoons." Her dear, departed father, Clement Poulet, had always told her, "Franny, you are the genuine article. You are solid. You are certain. You are like a refrigerator. You hum." But when Officer Poulet is atop Mrs. Bissinger's steep roof, nose to nose with the ghost raccoon screeching, "Frannnnnnnnnyyyyyyyyyy!" she is neither solid nor certain. She is terrified for the first time in her life. Francine, ashamed, resigns from her position, and it's not until a boy named Frank (who appreciates the fine points of animal control) convinces her to believe in herself again that she does.

DiCamillo's quick, dryly hilarious dialogue makes this over-the-top story shine, as does the tender subplot about Francine's father, who still roots for her from the great beyond. Chris Van Dusen's comical caricatures of Officer Poulet, the ridiculously bejeweled Mrs. Bissinger and that crazy ghost raccoon make the whole book hum. --Karin Snelson, children's editor, Shelf Awareness