BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON
"The Feast of Love," by Charles Baxter (Vintage, $13, paperback): On a moonlit night, an insomniac writer named Charles Baxter wanders through his neighborhood, where he meets up with his friend Bradley and his dog (also named Bradley). Baxter then hears the first of the tales of love lost and found that make up this luminous, bittersweet nod to Shakespeare's "A Midsummer's Night Dream." Among the characters are Bradley's two ex-wives; a young waitress named Chloe and her boyfriend Oscar; and Harry Ginsburg, an elderly philosophy professor, and his wife Esther. Baxter's vignettes are happy and sad, funny and sweet, sometimes bawdy, always graceful.
LARGER THAN LIFE
"Ravelstein," by Saul Bellow (Penguin, $13, paperback): The title character in Bellow's rich tale is a brilliant, sybaritic professor who suggests that his friend Chick write a memoir about him. In the first part of the book, the two head to Paris to share ideas, stories, philosophies, memories. But Ravelstein, this "great-souled" man, succumbs to AIDS, and the second half of the book finds Chick struggling to write about his friend. He's helped in no small part by his young wife Rosamund, his former assistant who was once Ravelstein's student. Readers familiar with Bellow's life and work will recognize that the author is Chick and Ravelstein is based on his close friend Allan Bloom, author of "The Closing of the American Mind."
SECRETS AND SURPRISES
"The Human Stain," by Philip Roth (Vintage, $14, paperback): For 50 years, Coleman Silk has had a secret that he has kept from his wife, his children, his university colleagues and close friends, including writer Nathan Zuckerman. The latter learns what Silk has been hiding when a chance remark interpreted as bigotry ends the aging-professor-turned-dean's academic career. That Silk could be viewed as a racist takes on supreme irony as Zuckerman reconstructs Silk's private life. Roth writes as masterfully as ever.
SPELLING IT OUT
"Bee Season," by Myla Goldberg (Anchor, $13, paperback): In Goldberg's intelligent and engaging first novel, 9-year-old Eliza Nauman, the "ordinary" member of her gifted family, amazes all when she wins a series of spelling bees. Her father Saul, previously absorbed in his studies of Jewish mysticism, begins tutoring Eliza. Meanwhile, her brainy mom Myriam embarks on a secret life of petty crime, and brother Aaron rebels against his faith. Eliza makes for an appealing and winning heroine as Goldberg writes of a family falling apart.
By Nancy Pate
The Orlando Sentinel
Amarillo Globe-News ©2015. All Rights Reserved.