Anne Tyler's 19th novel, The Beginner's Goodbye, is a slender but touching story about an editor-publisher of thin-spined "Beginner's" guides whose grieving for his late wife is stalled--until she comes back from the dead. Tyler's introduction of a conversing and strolling ghost in the first chapter is not as jarring as you might expect. The Pulitzer-winning novelist (Breathing Lessons) does nothing to distort her clear style, nor does she whip up any mumbo-jumbo dialogue to account for the lone paranormal character. In fact, the ghost of Dr. Dorothy Rosales seems just as stolid and practical as her pre-demise self, whom the reader sees in retrospect in the ensuing chapters, as widower Aaron Woolcott looks back on the year before Dorothy's visitations began, beginning with the event that abruptly deprived him of her under-appreciated companionship.

When Dorothy finally reappears, Tyler has simultaneously regained the element of surprise and loaded the reader's sympathy for the death-divided lovers because Aaron has been perseverating over the sore spots in their unfinished marriage. It's a bravura scene, heady with scent-memory and character-appropriate lyricism.

At first, Aaron doesn't believe ghost-Dorothy has a message for him, yet his tentative, delicate encounters with her teach him and the reader a life-seizing lesson: look now, listen now, love now. Fans of Ann Tyler won't be surprised that the ending of The Beginner's Goodbye gives Aaron a second chance to say both goodbye and hello.--Holloway McCandless, blogger at Litagogo: A Guide to Free Literary Podcasts

Christopher Moore has a knack for hitting a zany spot right between Tom Robbins and the comic fantasies of British novelist Tom Holt. Sacre Bleu continues in that vein, injecting a pair of bizarre immortal spirits into an enthusiastic, but not too reverential, tribute to the late 19th-century Paris art scene.

Actually, the novel opens outside the city, with Vincent van Gogh's murder (that's right, murder). The killer is a squat, mysterious figure known as the Colorman, who's sold his particularly potent shade of blue to just about every painter of note. Now, he and his partner, Juliette, have set their sights on Lucien Lessard, a second-generation Montmartre baker who, like his father before him, would really rather be an artist. But Juliette has broken Lucien's heart before--and his best friend, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, is determined to see that it doesn't happen again.

Moore uses the Colorman and Juliette to forge a clever occult connection between the leading Impressionists and the painters who came before and after them. Nearly everyone you would expect to see puts in at least a cameo appearance, and though some of the jokes are obvious--"Whistler, how's your mother?"--they serve to make these iconic figures more down-to-earth. Black-and-white reproductions of select paintings and prints provide additional context; it's a helpful touch, but you could know next to nothing about 19th-century art and still find your way through Sacre Bleu--and most of its jokes--with no trouble. If you are familiar with the scene, though, you've got that many more laughs coming your way. --Ron Hogan, founder of Beatrice.com

Over a trilogy of novels, Robert Olmstead has chronicled a century of war and its aftermath in the lives of the men of the Childs family. In Coal Black Horse, Robey Childs confronts the horrors of the Civil War in search of his father; then Napoleon Childs chases Pancho Villa through the mountains of Mexico in Far Bright Star. In the concluding volume, The Coldest Night, Olmstead brings us the even darker tale of Robey's grandson Henry.

In the first part of the novel, the young Henry finds some comfort in horses, baseball and a romance with Mercy, the impetuous daughter of a wealthy judge. When they elope to New Orleans, the judge sends Mercy's brother to bring her home and beat Henry senseless, a warning not to follow her back.

He enlists in the Marine Corps, where "they gave him three meals a day and a roof over his head, and he fired his rifle and screamed and bayoneted straw dummies. They told him he would be one of them forever." However, in the winter snow and cold of the Korean mountains, Henry learns that no one is anything forever. His Marine family is slaughtered, the few survivors left "deep in the coma of war, walking back down that frozen road... icicles of blood hanging from their bodies."

His aunt, a nurse, takes him in and attempts to ease him back into the world. He visits Mercy again, now alone with a daughter he never knew he fathered, and finds that their love is still alive. The Coldest Night is a bleak story told with harsh realism, offering only the slightest window of hope. --Bruce Jacobs

Devan Sipher, a writer for the New York Times "Vows" column, turns to what he knows best for his first novel, The Wedding Beat, a witty romantic comedy detailing the ups and downs of one man's hunt for true love. Gavin Greene, 37 and single, writes a wedding column for 'The Paper.' A hopeless romantic, Gavin is tired of being the single guy at all these weddings. Confronted by love and marriage on a daily basis, he is unhappily aware that he isn't getting any younger.

At a New Year's party, he happens to meet a beautiful woman named Melinda. Unfortunately, she leaves before he works up the courage to ask for her number, forcing him to search all over Manhattan for Melindas. Unable to find the right one, he dejectedly returns his focus back to reporting on other people's weddings.

Several months later, having becoming convinced he'll never meet the love of his life, Gavin finally crosses paths with Melinda again. The catch? Her upcoming nuptials are his latest story. Will he have the nerve to disrupt her wedding plans? Or will Melinda get away from him once again?

Sipher writes with a voice that makes Gavin's stresses about his job and his search for Melinda--even about his abnormally small neck--believable and funny. And seeing a love story play out from the man's perspective makes The Wedding Beat a refreshing take on traditional 'chick lit' themes.--Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Most romantic comedies end at the declaration of love and never explore the "happily-ever-after." Rurally Screwed entertains by continuing well past the "I do" and, best of all, this is a real-life romance, a memoir with a hilarious narrator.

Jessie Knadler never felt comfortable in her home state of Montana; she moved to New York City when she was 17 and spent years writing for women's magazines, perfecting her kundalini yoga and embracing her sardonic, neurotic destiny. On an assignment for Outdoor Adventure magazine, she returns to Montana to do an article on the Bucking Horse Sale and accidentally meets the love of her life--a man who shed his own hometown of Baltimore in order to become... a cowboy.

Once married, Jessie and Jake decide to move to Lexington, Va., and are soon knee-deep in chickens, moonshine and never-ending manual labor. Jessie feels lost in her new "identity" and must rediscover her authentic self.

While primarily the story of her love for her husband, Rurally Screwed is also a hero's journey as Jessie navigates her relationship with various identities--a child from Montana, a woman from New York, a wife in rural Virginia. Her searing wit and unflinching honesty is a pleasure to read; for example, her description of Lululemon-clad yoga fanatics as "what it would look like if Wall Street and reality TV had a baby." Fans of Ree Drummond's Pioneer Woman will love Rurally Screwed, as will anyone who has fallen madly in love with his or her opposite. --Kristen Galles from Book Club Classics

In Dreaming in French, National Book Award finalist Alice Kaplan traces the experiences of Jacqueline Bouvier, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis during the periods early in their adult lives that each lived in Paris.

Bouvier had grown up under a family myth of having descended from French royalty, complete with the habit of speaking only French at mealtimes; although the royalty bubble soon burst, Jackie--who was still pronouncing her own name in the French fashion--found a rich intellectual world in France, as well as a sense of elegance and presence that would come to define her personal social, professional and sartorial style. Sontag went to France during graduate school at age 24, leaving behind a husband and young son. Her French was poor, but her social life in the city was rich, and what it taught her about human sexuality and her own passions informed her work from her dissertation until her death. Davis, like Bouvier an undergraduate studying abroad, spoke French fluently but found herself navigating alien racial terrain as the only black student in her study abroad program, which took place as bombings tore apart her home town of Birmingham, Ala. Davis's political action was motivated in part by these tensions; when she faced murder charges several years later, France produced many of her strongest supporters.

Each woman went to Paris with a dream and emerged with a political reality often far different from her fantasy--but one that, in each case, magnified her strongest attributes. Dreaming in French is a perfect harmony of coming of age tales, French culture and political history. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Literary Cricket

Many parents won't want their babies to grow up like Mark Haskell Smith. Starting with his "gateway" Pabst Blue Ribbons, he chased the elusive teen high through exotic liqueurs cut with lukewarm Diet Pepsi, 'shrooms, E-bombs and sauvignon blanc before, as he puts it, cocaine, "party pooper that it is, ruined everything." He moved on to sober graduate school in Los Angeles, with only the occasional post-prandial joint to lubricate his Spanish-language skills with South American friends while finishing off their flan. Baby-boomer parents with their Kansas dirt pot and Golden Gate Park days behind them understand guys like Smith. In fact, they envy him--especially when he scores a gig to cover the annual High Times Cannabis Cup competition in Amsterdam.

Heart of Dankness is Smith's laidback account of the modern world of weed--from clandestine California grows (legal in-state, but not nationally) through the primo Hindu Kush fields of India to Amsterdam cafes. If his tale sometimes reads like one of those falsely euphoric, superficial, laugh-laced basement teen shout-out debates about sex and the top 10 Nirvana songs... well, maybe that's what all that ganja can do to a writer who can't quite leave out any of the funny stuff, even if it doesn't really go anywhere or add much to the story. However, no one should come to Smith's trippy search for the world's dankest bud looking for elucidation about the chemistry or commerce of marijuana: just come to enjoy the ride. –-Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.

For any woman who wishes someone would hand her an owner's manual for her sex life, Sex Made Easy, Debby Herbenick's straightforward collection of answers to 100 common sexual questions, is a must-have. Herbenick is a sex researcher, educator and columnist and no newcomer to awkward queries--she also answers questions on the Kinsey Institute's website Kinsey Confidential.

Herbenick divides her questions into broad categories, including chapters on genital anatomy and function, sexual health, orgasm, partner sex and helpful tips for times when parenting, pets and life in general get in the way of sexual fulfillment. She unabashedly discusses topics most mothers don't cover in the "birds and bees" talk, from pain during sex to mismatched libidos to the healthy use and care of sex toys. Using a frank, conversational voice--but never resorting to vulgar or sanitizing slang terms--Herbenick backs up her answers with scientific research and points out instances in which research has proved inconclusive, as with conflicting studies on the existence or nonexistence of the G-spot. Readers wanting a position manual should look elsewhere; Herbenick's advice addresses sex concepts and concerns rather than the mechanics of the act.

Although Herbenick writes with a female audience in mind, readers of both genders will benefit from her knowledge. For better sexual understanding and satisfaction, pick up this classy yet candid read. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger, Infinite Reads

The highest calling of poetry might be in witness, the ability to depict important, history-altering events from the ground level with the highest level of wisdom and lucidity.

June Fourth Elegies is a stellar example of this, a work that is an unflinching catalogue of government-induced misery, a testament to the human spirit's capacity and a creative work of the highest order. The poems were inspired by the Tiananmen Square protests that the Chinese government ended forcefully, in blood, on June 4, 1989. Nobel Peace Prize recipient Liu Xiaobo took part in these events, and his poems are relentless and harrowing in the recounting of all that was lost on that day and in the years since. They are rage-filled, eloquent, devoid of easy comforts; they brim with survivor's guilt, explicit rage against the government and implicit rage against his fellow citizens who turned a blind eye to the shameful events.

As an important event in world literature, June Fourth Elegies speaks in brave, penetrating language of all that can be lost when totalitarian governments run rough-shod over their own people and of the compensatory balms of great poetry, even when it's an unadorned howl of rage. --Donald Powell, freelance writer

In this third stellar collaboration by the creators of On the Farm and In the Wild, poet and artist do for the ocean depths what they did for the barnyard and jungle.

David Elliott once again invents surprising similes that ask us to reconsider familiar creatures. Take "The Sea Turtle," which swims for 30 years and returns to its birthplace: "Rare instrument of nature,/ fair compass in a carapace." Holly Meade portrays the cavernous mouth of "The Shark" to underscore the impact of the poem's last lines: "The fin,/ the skin,/ the brutal grin.../ The terror/ of the dark within." After a number of blue and green–dominated undersea spreads, poet and artist shake things up with the golden-hued landscape of "The Starfish": "Five fingers,/ like a hand,/ the starfish shines/ in a sky of sand." Other spreads emphasize the interconnectedness of sea life, such as a coral reef, anemone and the clown fish, which is "not an enemy/ of anemone;/ in fact, it is anemone's maid,/ for which anemone/ stings its enemies./ And that's how friends are made."

Author and artist build to a dramatic finish with "The Blue Whale." This "largest animal alive" barely breaks the surface of the ocean and dominates the horizon line in Meade's illustration, as it "sings a chanty deep and slow/ of winds that rage and storms that blow." Thanks to this collection of 17 poems, we stop to consider the awe-inspiring life that goes on in our planet's salty depths. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

The mother-son team behind Birds of a Feather returns with another arresting compilation of poems, photographs and facts about bugs.

Even those who'd rather avoid insects and spiders may come to appreciate them through these lyrical, often humorous rhymes and mesmerizing close-up images. A variety of poetic forms plus brief facts help readers differentiate between insects, spiders and in-between species such as a daddy longlegs ("How do you know/ Which leg goes first?/ Are all your walking moves/ Rehearsed?"). Alongside her first poem, "Oh, Fly" ("[o]h you are/ a lovely fly./ Just/ do not go/ and multiply"), with its photo of a house fly with a shimmering pair of wings, the poet helps distinguish between the orders of a species. Flies in the order Diptera, meaning "two" (di) "wings" (ptera), are known as "true" flies, while others, despite the "fly" in their names (such as dragonflies and mayflies) are not. A later poem, "Dragonfly Lights," with Stemple's photo of the lovely subject's four wings "of dark-stained glass," reinforces her point.

A limerick issues a warning about the praying mantis, and rhyming couplets pay tribute to the fleeting beauty of the butterfly. The most unified presentation occurs in the spread of the lilting and witty "Spider to the Poet," inspired by a photo of a glorious green and yellow arachnid spinning a web against an emerald green background, and elucidated by a succinct summary of the Greek myth of Arachne. These poems and images will inspire children to examine the creepy, crawly critters around them more closely and appreciatively. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness