Outlandish as it may sound, Kory Stamper has now given us a spiritedly breathless account of the effort to define thousands of different colors—define, as in “dictionary entry.”

Rare among contemporary writers, Kate Zambreno does not produce books that are “about” one subject, or even three or four. They are about themselves. As well as about an infinitude.

Harris Lahti’s debut, Foreclosure Gothic, is a goth song in novel form. It is full of murk, omens, melodrama, the lushness of carnality, and the fearsomeness of love’s darker impulses. It follows the fitful life arc of its protagonist Vic from young adulthood in the eighties to death some four decades later, years rife with the most frightening thing most of us will ever confront: the rationales we concoct to avoid our own failures.

In undertaking the dual biography of his aunt and uncle, the artists Cindy Suffoletto and Andrew Topolski, Aidan Ryan looked in two directions: backward at the arc of their too-short lives and forward into his own potential as a writer. All three of them are products of the unique artistic milieu of Buffalo, New York, during different acts of its own drama. In I Am Here You Are Not I Love You, the city too is a prominent character in this largely melancholy chronicle. In the lives of Suffoletto and Topolski and the declining city alike, near-misses are a defining occurrence.

Van Eerden’s project is to reveal the linkages between what we might consider great concerns—the nature of godliness, the longing to have a child—and small ones, such as the ways home (in her case, West Virginia) imprints its particularities on us.