James Purdy (1914-2009) is considered by some to be an authentic American genius, yet most "well-read" Americans haven't heard of him. Liveright is trying to change that by reissuing his works, starting with a massive compendium of his short stories.

In his idiosyncratic introduction, filmmaker John Waters calls these pieces "gracefully disquieting stories for the wicked." The New York Times's 2009 obituary described Purdy's writings as "savagely comic," a "psychic landscape of deluded innocence, sexual obsession, violence and isolation." While such descriptions would be catnip for readers today, for a writer in the 1940s and '50s, publishing grotesque surreal gothic often resulted in obscurity.

His language and style are a bit old fashioned, his sentences sparse, condensed. His subject matter is a cross between Nathanael West (sans Hollywood) and Flannery O'Connor (sans religion): a diva's career is managed by a talking cat; a lonely man talks to himself every night in a bar's phone booth; an elderly eighth-grade teacher walks naked from her school to the house of a student from 20 years ago. In one of Purdy's most famous pieces, the 1956 novella "63: Dream Palace," which he originally self-published in an edition he designed, two teenage brothers move from the South to an abandoned building in Chicago. It touches on familiar Purdy themes--homosexuality and alienation--but closes with a shocking incident of fratricide.

As a fearless iconoclast, Purdy deserves our rediscovery. The seemingly simple yet compelling prose of The Complete Short Stories belies the haunting, slightly creepy stories that live within. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Susanna Daniel (Stiltsville) explores marriage and motherhood in all their complications in her second novel, Sea Creatures. Georgia and her husband, Graham, leave the Midwest for her hometown of Miami when his sleep disorder costs him his job at Northwestern and her own college counseling business tanks. Her father and stepmother welcome the couple and their three-year-old son, Frankie, letting them use a slip on the canal to moor their houseboat.

Graham finds a research job and Georgia goes about being the quintessential helicopter mother, devoted to Frankie--who hasn't spoken a word in 18 months. It was Georgia's idea to have a child, and Graham has not adjusted well--furthermore, he doesn't like Miami. Georgia takes a job as an errand girl for Charlie, a reclusive artist. Frankie goes with her, which opens new avenues of communication for all three of them.

Daniel has orchestrated everything to work against the success of this move: Graham's sleep issues, Frankie's mutism, Georgia's terror that she isn't a good mother. (The origins of Frankie's silence are murky, but Daniel hints that Graham's disorder is somehow involved.) When Hurricane Andrew blows through southern Florida, Daniel has the necessary deus ex machina to rearrange everything--in startling ways. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.

In his debut novel, The Skull and the Nightingale, Michael Irwin tells the story of Richard Fenwick, a young man just returned to 18th-century London after a European tour. Or rather, he lets Richard tell his story, cobbling together a first-person narration and a collection of letters written to his godfather, a wealthy gentleman living in the English countryside.

Orphaned at a young age, Richard has long been under the care and protection of his godfather, and so thinks it perfectly reasonable to be offered employment by the gentleman following his education. When he learns his godfather means to put him up in London with a generous allowance and let him live out his days as he chooses, required only to write of his adventures, the employment seems to good to be true. Of course, the arrangement is too good to be true, and Richard finds himself caught in a trap of lies and manipulation, fighting to maintain his independence while still keeping his patron satisfied with his tales of danger and adventure--and lust.

Though slow to start, The Skull and the Nightingale hits its stride once Richard begins his records for his godfather. Richard's exploits turn rapidly to sex and manipulation, and so his story will not be for everyone, but for readers who wish to explore the sordid underbelly of 18th-century London, The Skull and the Nightingale will not disappoint. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

After a life of countless foster homes and juvenile offenses, 15-year-old Anais Hendricks now faces jail time after allegedly putting an abusive police officer in a coma. Anais doesn't remember assaulting the officer but, due to drugs and alcohol, she also doesn't remember anything else. While awaiting her fate, Anais is hauled to the Panopticon, a high-security foster-care facility. Like Anais, the other "clients" here have faced abuse and neglect, often by the adults who were responsible for protecting them.

Set in Scotland and thus evoking inevitable comparisons to Trainspotting, Jenni Fagan's debut novel, The Panopticon, depicts the devastating realities of lifelong foster care. Sensitive and precocious beyond her years, Anais reads avidly (from classics to vampire novels) and dreams of a future beyond the surveillance of what she calls "the experiment."

Fagan excels at portraying the desolation of a child unmoored who, in her short life, has experienced and witnessed abuse--and even dealt with the grisly murder of a loved foster mother. By the time Anais reaches the Panopticon, she views every adult as a potential--and likely--enemy.

A reader of The Panopticon becomes entrenched in Anais's mind, absorbing her acid observations and theories, as well as the flashbacks that gradually shed light on her past. Enjoyment of the novel very much hinges on whether the reader enjoys Anais's voice. While Fagan introduces various elements of plot--a mysterious coma, the question of whether Anais's fear of "the experiment" is sane--what the novel does best is to illuminate harshly, like the light from the security tower at the center of the Panopticon, a life most readers are unlikely to observe firsthand. --Ilana Teitelbaum, book reviewer at the Huffington Post

RITA Award winner Caroline Linden opens a new Regency series with the light and humorous Love and Other Scandals. Joan Bennett is a hair's breadth from spinsterhood, having gone through four seasons without a single suitor. Her sardonic wit and unusual height seem to put off the gentlemen. With a love affair of her own growing more improbably every day, Joan indulges her curiosity by surreptitiously reading a scandalous series of pamphlets called 50 Ways to Sin.

Although her indomitable mother isn't disinterested in Joan, her current priority is finding a suitable wife for Joan's brother, heir to the family title. When Joan accosts her brother at his townhouse to deliver their mother's summons to a ball, she runs into his lifelong friend and drinking mate, Viscount Burke. 

Even if Tristan were in market for a betrothed, Joan is the last woman he would ever choose. Not only is she his best friend's sister, making courtship awkward to the point of impossibility, she has the most impertinent tongue and wears the most unflattering clothes imaginable. If only her scathing wit didn't have him thinking about stopping her mouth with kisses, and if only her hideously frilly garments didn't have him thinking about how she would look without them!

While Linden's sweet love story doesn't cover new ground, it nonetheless hits all the traditional right notes of the reformed rake storyline, and readers will smile as prim, but perhaps not so proper, Joan wins the love of London's most notorious heartbreaker. --Jaclyn Fulwood, youth services manager at Latah County Library District and blogger at Infinite Reads

Judith Flanders (A Circle of Sisters) tackles an unwieldy subject in The Invention of Murder, telling the tale admirably well, even entertainingly.

The Victorian British, Flanders tells us, were the first to identify murder as an object of fascination--inspiring in turn a passionate interest in trials, executions, motives and, eventually, the developing profession of solving crimes. The action opens in 1811 with the murdered Marr family, and quickly moves to 1820s Edinburgh, where Burke and Hare infamously killed so they could to sell the corpses to doctors as medical specimens. Flanders introduces a lengthy list of famous (and obscure) murderers and serial killers, culminating, of course, with Jack the Ripper. Alongside the killers and their victims, she presents Thomas Hardy, George Eliot and many contributions by Charles Dickens to illustrate her thesis that murder in life inspired murder in art. Fictional murderers and detectives play a role equal to their real-life counterparts, as Sweeney Todd and Sherlock Holmes take the stage.

Flanders also tracks the evolution of the police force from a force of deterrence to an investigative organization, along with the parallel development of murder and detection in literature and on the stage. The penny-blood (or penny-dreadful), a cheap booklet telling a sordid and often illustrated tale of horror, morphs into the detective novel (and play), as the public shifts its interest from bloody murder to the newly invented and increasingly sympathetic crimesolvers we know and love today. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

David McRaney follows up 2011's You Are Not So Smart with another series of thought-provoking ideas, observations and analysis on why humans think and act the way we do. You Are Now Less Dumb digs deep into the annals of scientific investigations, debunking a variety of commonly accepted "misconceptions" on human behavior. The notion that "you objectively appraise the individual attributes of other people," for example, is corrected and recast as "you judge specific qualities of others based on your global evaluation of their character and appearance." As McRaney explains, this is due to a "halo effect" that "causes one trait about a person to color your attitude and perceptions of all their other traits." (This is why short actors stand on boxes to appear as tall or taller than their counterparts; tall people automatically garner more positive emotions.)

Want to know how much money it takes to be a happy American or how the environment can affect your degree of sexual arousal? McRaney supports his arguments on these and other subjects with many case studies conducted by scientists whose experiments isolated the one factor they were searching for in their test subjects. The prose is dense, at times mindboggling, but McRaney does provide readers with many new ideas. Like many concepts, though, there are exceptions to every rule--and not everyone may agree with his keen analysis. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

An autistic savant who has set a European record for the most publicly recited digits of pi (22,514), Daniel Tammet sees numbers a bit differently than most people do. In the essays in Thinking in Numbers, he explores math as it relates to family relationships, snowflakes, chess and a host of other topics. From Shakespeare learning the concept of zero to the unknowable poetry of prime numbers, Tammet juxtaposes math and life in startling and often entertaining ways.

Tammet, the oldest of nine children, begins by musing on the many possible combinations (sets) of himself and his siblings. In "A Model Mother," he further relates math to family by drawing distinctions between our perceptions of other people and the reality of their true selves. Touching on subjects from history (Anne Boleyn's 11 fingers) to language ("Counting to Four in Icelandic"), literature ("A Novelist's Calculus") and Japanese proverbs, Tammet waxes philosophical as he considers the effects of numbers on our lives and how ultimately we fail to grasp their quantity, their beauty or all their other characteristics--much as we do with other people.

Since Tammet has a deep knowledge of mathematics, his writing occasionally grows too abstract for those who have not studied higher math. But most of these essays provide a smart, engaging, accessible guide to the intersection of mathematics, philosophy and the numerous (and numerical) worlds in which we live. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams

What kid doesn't want to have special powers, especially the ability to hypnotize adults?

With a large helping of humor, Gordon Korman (Ungifted; Schooled) introduces 12-year-old Jackson Opus, who has eyes that change color. Lately people have been doing strange things just because Jax wants them to. At first, the boy shrugs it off. But when the Amazing Ramolo starts strutting across the stage and clucking in his own chicken act, Jax must admit that something very strange is going on. He's invited to join the Sentia Institute, where he learns that he has the power to bend people's minds. Its founder, Dr. Elias Mako, wants to teach him how to control it. "We'll nurture and develop your gift in every way," Dr. Mako says. "And together we'll change the world."

At first, all Jax has to do is make people jump up and down, and other harmless tasks. But when Dr. Mako asks Jax to hypnotize his subjects remotely, using a video camera, Jax begins to worry. Jax does a little investigating, and uncovers a plot shocking in its scope. Soon Jax and his best friend, Tommy, are racing to stop Dr. Mako's evil plan, in addition to saving themselves, Jax's parents and the entire country, before it's too late.

Gordon Korman delivers yet another gently suspenseful and funny romp that will satisfy his many fans. Readers will hope that subsequent books in the series are just as mesmerizing. --Lynn Becker, host of Book Talk, the monthly online discussion of children's books for the Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators

Hilary McKay fans will glom onto this insightful, often funny novel about Blue (short for "Bluebell") who is trying to soldier on after the death of her twin. ("Since Iris died, at school I am the shadow," Blue thinks.) That was three years ago. Everyone else in the Gadsby family seems to have moved past the loss of Iris, but Blue still feels as though Iris is near.

The 13-year-old combines "conventional diary entries" with transcripts of short films, which read as screenplays. Blue enjoys filming people, especially her family, and her observations reveal an artist's eye at work. Farrant gets Blue's voice just right, which makes this tale of the Gadsbys ideal for reading aloud. Her parents often travel for business, so one of her father's students comes to look after them (this follows immediately after 16-year-old Flora's negligence leads to one of her youngest siblings landing in the hospital). Zoran is a fine cook and an even better friend to the Gadsby children, and their Grandma makes a wonderful confidante, too.

Blue ultimately discovers that she's not a shadow, nor does she have to pretend that everything will be fine. This poignant novel will be a salve to young people who've lost a loved one, and for everyone else, they'll discover a family they wished lived next door. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness