In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, Ellen Gilchrist's first collection of short stories, was published in 1981 to wide critical acclaim; her next collection, Victory over Japan, won the National Book Award. Since then, she's gone on to publish several more collections, as well as novels, poetry and nonfiction. Now she's back with Acts of God, a collection of wistful, reflective and accomplished stories.

It's a book that comes "out of my later years," Gilchrist tells us, and the past features prominently in many of these stories. They are all set in the South, in places like Biloxi, Fayetteville and New Orleans; most of the main characters are women. In "Miracle in Adkins, Arkansas," a group of high school students drive to a small town devastated by a tornado. Searching the site, they part the branches of a fallen tree, and a baby, tossed there by the storm, begins to scream. It affects them greatly. Our narrator tells us, "I need to remember all this."

In "Jumping Off Bridges into Clean Water," a group of adults think about the time when they were young and jumped off a bridge into the roaring river, while in "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor," three elderly ladies share stories about their pasts while they drink for free in an airlines' guest lounge.

All of these stories are classic narratives. There are no literary pyrotechnics here nor obscure experimentalism--simply heartfelt tales exquisitely told. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Family is the cornerstone of Julia McDonnell's (A Year of Favor) Mimi Malloy, At Last!, a later-in-life, coming-of-age novel about the nature of memory. Maire "Mimi" Sheehan Malloy, age 68, sneaks cigarettes and Manhattans, worships Frank Sinatra and thought she was finally settling into her forced retirement. But when a leak springs in a closet ceiling of her modest apartment in Quincy, Mass., the divorcée--one of seven children in an Irish-Catholic family and herself a mother of six daughters--finds her quiet life upended. Dick Duffy, the building handyman with a "bum leg... and a big heart," addresses the leak, and Mimi discovers a striking silver pendant with an aquamarine stone. How did it get in her closet? Mimi, who's suffered mini-strokes that have left holes in her memory, cannot remember anything about the pendant or its history.

While Mimi and Dick, a World War II veteran and widower, begin a relationship, Mimi's grandnephew enlists her help for a genealogy study for school. Mimi's sisters and daughters press for details from the "glory days" of childhood, but what they find is a painful past, long repressed, featuring an abusive stepmother and a long-lost baby sister. Might the pendant somehow be connected?

MacDonnell's multifaceted novel unspools via flashbacks. Mimi's no-nonsense narrative voice and a cast of well-drawn characters take readers on a humbling journey that explores the past and present; the bonds between parents, children and sisters; the power of secrets; and heroic acts of love. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines

The Word Exchange, Alena Graedon's debut novel, introduces readers to a not-so-distant future in which the oft-predicted death of the book has come to pass. As people become more and more dependent on their "Memes"--devices similar to our current smartphones, but with more predictive functionality--books, newspapers and dictionaries have become increasingly obsolete. Perhaps it is because of the obscurity of his work that lexicographer Doug Johnson has started to become paranoid about his safety--but when he goes missing, his daughter, Anana, is forced to accept that his fears may not have been unfounded.

As Anana probes deeper and deeper into her father's disappearance, it becomes clear the missing lexicographer lies at the heart of a larger problem: a "word flu" that is threatening the world's ability to communicate.

The Word Exchange is a riot of a read, asking big questions about our present and our future; Anana's investigations force readers to consider the ever-increasing role technology plays in our day-to-day lives and the importance of language in shaping our identities and communicating with the world around us. Graedon's clever incorporation of obscure vocabulary will leave those reading on paper reaching for the nearest dictionary--while those reading on devices will think twice about clicking on the words to look up their definitions. --Kerry McHugh, blogger at Entomology of a Bookworm

Danica Novgorodoff (Refresh, Refresh) puts a romantically morbid spin on an ancient Chinese tradition in her lushly illustrated story of a second son trying to please his parents.

When Deshi Li's older brother, Wei, dies after the two squabble, their inconsolable parents charge Deshi with the task of finding his deceased brother a wife. In China, an old tradition allows families to marry a dead son to a dead single woman so they might spend eternity together. When the grave robber provides only a rotting corpse, Deshi grows desperate. He knows his parents will accept only a beautiful, unspoiled bride for their beloved eldest son. Gorgeous village girl Lily Chen appears with such perfect timing that she seems like the answer to Deshi's prayers. Unfortunately for his mission, smart and sassy Lily is still alive. Is Deshi desperate enough to turn to murder?

While Deshi lives under the shadow of his parents' focus on tradition, Lily longs for modern life in the big city. Although both youngsters are naive, their opposite worldviews encourage them to reach out to each other and find a middle ground between a past rooted in the afterlife and a future too bright to come true. Novgorodoff's sunlight-drenched watercolor landscapes provide a gorgeous backdrop for the line-art characters as they travel the winding mountain roads of northern China. While plot points can be morbid, gritty or violent by turns, Deshi and Lily have plenty of opportunities to find and enjoy the hope of escape and redemption. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

Part of a cookbook series by the Culinary Institute of America, Low and Slow is full of recipes for delicious slow-cooked foods and helpful tips about how methods like braising and barbecuing can develop flavors that faster cooking methods can't.

The slow-cooking method lends itself most obviously to meat-heavy recipes like Korean-Style Braised Short Ribs and Moroccan Chicken Tagine, since a long roast of cheaper cuts of meat can achieve perfectly tender results. However, Low and Slow contains a surprising number of vegetable dishes, too, like Roasted Corn and Jicama Salad and Brussels Sprouts Slaw, as well as sauces and rubs to augment your final product, like Apple-Horseradish Cream or Lentil Ragout.

The instructions are clear and easy to follow, though there are no exact cooking times (just estimates like "6 to 8 hours"). Helpful sidebars ("Chef's Notes") offer variations--like cooking lamb shanks in a slow-cooker instead of a Dutch oven, or adding blue cheese or lobster to a basic macaroni and cheese. Ideal for both novice cooks and those who want to hone their skills, Low and Slow gives guidance on the proper equipment, formulas for creating a perfect brine, guidelines on regional variations in barbecuing methodologies and tips on which cuts of meat work best with which cooking strategy. Best of all, it has many illustrated step-by-step procedures for different techniques, making it easy to re-create a recipe exactly as shown. Those aspiring to improve their slow-cooking will appreciate having the Culinary Institute of America's expertise in their home kitchens. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

France is justifiably famous for its wines, and in Land and Wine Charles Frankel takes the reader on a geological journey to discover why the French landscape is perfect for growing grapes. Frankel focuses on the terroir--a word without an exact English translation that means the combination of geography, geology and microclimate of a specific small region. Terroir can change rapidly; even grapes grown a few dozen yards apart can produce very different wines.

Frankel explores the wine-making regions of France in order of geological age, starting with Savennières, which sits atop an ancient Hercynian massif in Brittany, and ending with the Rhône Valley. Much of the information is technical, offering detailed descriptions of the soil and rock in each terroir, but the academic tone of these sections is spiked with interesting information about the history of wine making and famous wine-lovers.

For example, on the hill of Corton in Burgundy, 25 wines are produced in an area one-third the size of Central Park. Frankel explains why Corton's terroir has made it ideal for producing so many superior wines--favored by luminaries such as Voltaire and John F. Kennedy--despite being such a tiny area.

Part geology textbook, part history of France, part wine-tasting guide, Land and Wine, while perhaps a bit esoteric for the average layman, is nevertheless fascinating. Wine experts and geologists will both profit from the intriguing information it contains. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm

Barbara Ehrenreich earned a Ph.D. in chemistry before achieving recognition for her writing on contemporary social issues (Nickel and Dimed; Bright-Sided). Her work has always reflected the rigors of science combined with her own empirical experience. Those qualities inform Living with a Wild God, a breathtaking and unsettling account of her lifelong search for meaning.

Ehrenreich, with dysfunctional alcoholic parents and boasting a precocious intellect, began keeping a journal at 14. She wrote to understand "the point of our brief existence here" but also to make sense of the dissociative episodes she had begun to experience, which culminated in an inexplicable encounter that challenged her atheism. Years later, she returned to those adolescent brushes with the mystical and her existential query.

The result is not quite autobiography and not quite rigorous philosophical inquiry, though it borrows from both. She examines the role of experience in whom we become; the line between routine dissociation and mental illness; and the insights of poets, spiritual leaders and other thinkers on alternate ways of understanding. She is fearlessly willing to reveal intimate observations; anger and grief over the inhumanity of her childhood infuse her narrative, as does her complicated love for her father. But the routine details of autobiography--romances, marriages, accomplishments--are missing in deference to the more personal story of her quest.

Ehrenreich doesn't give up her atheism but gradually allows for the possibility of experiences that defy science. Her conclusion will surprise and unsettle many of her readers, and it is a testament to her unsparing honesty that she makes it unapologetically. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer

Arlo Crawford's memoir of a summer spent on his parents' farm in south-central Pennsylvania is redolent with rhythms: of the seasons and of the plant-pick-water-weed cycle on an organic produce farm. Searching for new directions in his early 30s, Crawford returned to the land of his childhood and joined the crew of apprentices and farm managers who oversaw the production of fruits and vegetables on the 95 acres. He quickly fell into the swirl of sunup-to-sundown tasks--setting up irrigation lines; searching for bug damage; picking, boxing and selling the produce--that generated income not only for his parents but for the many seasonal workers who buzzed like so many bees around the central core of the farm, the house and barn.

Uneasy with sleeping in his childhood room, Crawford built a tent platform tucked among the trees, far from the hubbub of controlled chaos that had reigned on the land for more than 40 years. Here, he learned to listen to the silence. He gained respect for his father's tenacity in the face of crop disasters and he questioned and challenged his fears surrounding the murder of a neighbor, an event that had haunted him for 20 years. Poetic, colorful details--"The rows of vegetables stretched across the rise beside the road, black on black under the faint moon, and the early-summer air smelled liked dust and chlorophyll"--bring life on this farm to the forefront, providing readers with a wistful contemplation on the purpose and drive behind every person's labors. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer

Thomas Goetz's The Remedy achieves a rare feat: serious, accurate scientific writing that is also engaging and entertaining.

In the mid-1800s, the practice of medicine largely resembled groping in the dark. Patients came to doctors "with the hope of a cure but never the expectation of one." The final decades of that century, however, were marked by extraordinary advances in science, technology and medicine: "germ theory" was developed, infectious diseases were better understood, and more-modern notions of hygiene and sanitation began to catch on. Robert Koch, a provincial German doctor, pioneered experiment design and research standards, and in 1882 he identified the bacterial cause of tuberculosis--the most deadly disease in human history.

Koch attempted to develop a cure for TB, which he presented in Berlin. Despite meticulous empirical methods he had established, Koch's zeal for his remedy led to his downfall, as his treatment was unprovable. An obscure British doctor and sometime writer, also provincial, was the first to pen an appropriately skeptical response. Despite his criticism, Arthur Conan Doyle was a great admirer of Koch and appreciated his scrupulous observations; in fact, Goetz asserts that without Koch, "there may never have been a Sherlock Holmes as we know him."

The intersection of Koch and Doyle brought the spirit of scientific discovery to crime detection, and the spirit of investigation to scientific research. Goetz's exploration of their lives and their impact on the world as we know it is both historically significant and enthralling. --Julia Jenkins, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia

Maxine Kumin, the former poet laureate who died February 6, was the last of a great generation of woman poets that included Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Her 17th collection, And Short the Season, is her last.

The poems are filled with joy, sorrow, anger, mortality, politics and horses--lots of references to her cherished horses. When she was 73, she fell off one and broke her neck; though she recovered, pain was with her the rest of her life (as one poem here explores). Some poems deal with other artists, like her imagined version of a visit by Walt Whitman to a dear friend in Dublin just before he died. Others are about Hardy, Ginsberg, Van Gogh, even Michael Jackson.

There are harsh political poems about rendition and torture, as well as pieces about global warming, like "Just Deserts" ("For however long it takes it will serve us right"). Others touch on her own poetry and writing,
"slumped at my desk
over unborn poems
...mostly deleting, deleting, deleting
in an ecstasy of failure."

The longest poem, the stubbornly feminist "Sonnets Uncorseted," confronts the "almost all-male enclave of poetry" in the 1950s, while the last poem, "Allow Me," offers a prescient vision of her death at her beloved New Hampshire farm:
"Sudden and quiet, surrounded by friends
--John Milton's way--
But who gets to choose this ordered end
Trim and untattered, loved ones at hand?
--Allow me that day."
               --Tom Lavoie, former publisher

Big Brown Bear wants to entice four "grimy" but stubborn cubs into the bath, and finds a wonderful way to accomplish his mission in this fresh twist on bathtime tales.

An inviting tub awaits: "Water, soap, and/ sponge are there./ The bath is ready./ Where are the bears?" A gentle rhyme introduces the cast: cobwebby Floppy Bear; mud-spattered Fuzzy Bear; Calico, whose fur is sweaty "from playing hard"; and Yellow Bear--"He's stinky and/ he doesn't care." The four cubs see the tub and "Big Brown Bear/ waiting to scrub," and they back away. " 'We don't want a bath,' they say." Sound familiar? David Walker uses acrylics like pastels, as he depicts an irresistible parade of toddler stand-ins tracking muddy paw prints hither and yon. Big Brown Bear "scoops up one/ and then two more./ He grabs the last./ He's got all four!" The cubs and their caretaker erupt in a giggly embrace then wriggle away, leaving Big Brown Bear all "smudges and smears." So what does he do? He "jumps in the tub... and starts to scrub." Walker portrays the big bear's infectious enthusiasm, and the cubs, one at a time, want to join in the fun, their rear paws flailing as they climb over the side of the tub.

Parenteau and Walker close with a simple math lesson: "Now all five bears/ are clean again," as Big Brown Bear lovingly wraps each of his charges in a fluffy towel. Guaranteed to break down resistance to bathtime. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness

Debut author Alexandra Duncan portrays a patriarchal civilization eerily reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

The Earth is tainted--if a woman were to step onto its surface, its filth would contaminate her spirit and body. The people of the merchant ship Parastrata left the planet 1,000 years ago, and only the men periodically return to Earth to trade. Even as the eldest daughter of the ship's captain, 16-year-old Ava lives a life of subservience and duty. But after she learns a few "Fixes" from her friend Soli on the ship Æther, she realizes she'd rather expand her mind than tend to livestock and laundry. Her intellect is well-suited to problem-solving, but her father forbids it. "It's only a step from fixing to flying," he tells her. "You can't nurse a baby and run a navigation program at the same time." An arranged marriage to seal a connection with Æther gives Ava hope for change. Perhaps on this more enlightened ship she can learn to read and work on Fixes. But a premarital act of intimacy threatens Ava's safety and future. Her aunt takes drastic measures to dispatch Ava to Earth, and sets in motion a journey of self-discovery. Ava must confront long-held secrets in order to discover the truth behind her family and civilization, and then to figure out what she really wants.

Duncan's fast-paced narrative and original settings--from the Parastrata to the Gyre (a floating garbage mass in the Pacific) to Mumbai--will keep readers riveted. --Jessica Bushore, former public librarian and freelance writer

Martha Jocelyn (How It Happened in Peach Hill) threads together the perspectives of eight 16-year-olds in an engrossing exploration of truth and lying--as acts of omission and commission. Her novel takes place during the Vietnam War at a British boarding school.

The narrative moves among the points of view of--among others--Jenny, an American whose brother is dodging the draft by attending college in Britain; Brenda, a day student on scholarship who at times offers greater insight than her wealthier classmates; Nico, with a perverse wish to live out his infamous author mother's sexual escapades; Penelope, the perceptive yet often misguided class "slag"; and Kirsten, whose brother discovers he's gay when he meets up with Robbie, a townie who "knew before [Luke] did that he was queer." Robbie is viciously attacked, and Luke works at keeping his own sexuality secret. Jenny's fabrication of a sexual relationship with her brother's African-American best friend, Matt, who's serving in Vietnam, plumbs the complicated feelings around her brother's avoidance of the draft, her unrequited love for Matt and her wish to seem as exotic as her British peers. She poses the book's central question: "Were we all hiding all the time, camouflaged by what other people expected to see?"

Jocelyn creates a complex mosaic of varied life experiences, deftly moving from first-person to third-person narratives and establishing distinct characters, against the backdrop of a controversial war at a time when everyone grew up quickly. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness