Mike Shea on the month’s new releases

Mylène Dressler

The Floodmakers

Putnam

In The Floodmakers (Putnam), Houstonian Mylène Dressler applies a sort of emotional calculus to solve the relationships between struggling New York playwright Harry Buelle and his sister, Sarah, stepmother, Jean, and father, Dee, now 81 but in his time a successful writer for the New York stage. Summoned to visit his slightly eccentric parents at their Texas beach house, Harry measures his own failures (the writing isn't going so well, and his boyfriend is a disaster) against Dee's stellar career and cantankerous joie de vivre. The Floodmakers is staged like an Off-Broadway drama, and Dressler writes with a casual brilliance that allows this little gem of a book to sparkle and shine.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest

Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana

Villard

Twenty-four-year-olds should not write memoirs, but Stephanie Elizondo Griest earns a conditional exception with her charmingly self- effacing memoir Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana (Villard). Following a year of study in Moscow and a year as a journalist in Beijing (the Havana stay, just two weeks in length, is a bit of a bait and switch), the self-proclaimed "militant vegetarian Chicana feminist" from Corpus Christi found her expectations blown up and her American veneer melted down. Around the Bloc reads funny and sad with equal frequency, and Griest's engaging point of view has the earmarks of a journalistic star in the wings.

Joe R. Lansdale

Sunset and Sawdust

Knopf

Sunset and Sawdust (Knopf) is another step toward the literary mainstream for East Texas iconoclast Joe R. Lansdale, but this offbeat Depression-era mystery still delivers the unexpected and bizarre that his fans have come to expect. Sunset Jones was just the constable's wife until the day he beat her one too many times and she delivered his fatal comeuppance. Now Constable Sunset and a parade of colorful characters are solving mysteries in tiny Camp Rapture, Texas. The narrative is entertaining, but Lansdale's patently unvarnished storytelling—backwoods and brash all at once—is the real reason to crack this cover.