Mike Shea on the month’s new releases

T. Cooper

Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes

Dutton Adult

T Cooper strews ambiguity like clues at a crime scene throughout Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes (Dutton), a potent second novel. Was the author really born in the Texas Panhandle? Did Jewish refugee Esther Lipshitz really find her lost son’s body in a Central Park pond? What’s the relationship between the T Cooper who narrates the book’s one-hundred-page coda (and makes a living impersonating Eminem at bar mitzvahs) and the author of the same name? Cooper dangles tiny mysteries and then cleverly pieces them together to tell the tale of the Lipshitz family, who escape the Russian pogroms of 1903 only to lose their youngest son, Reuven, upon arrival in New York. They continue west to Amarillo, where the younger generations prosper even while their matriarch obsesses unhealthily about aviator Charles Lindbergh. The Lipshitz story is brilliant, and the post-modern coda, despite a jarringly bad transition, offers up a surprising conclusion.

Mary Karr

Sinners Welcome

HarperCollins

Before diving into the 43 poems of Sinners Welcome (HarperCollins), consider skipping straight to the back for poet/author Mary Karr’s sardonic essay on prayer and poetry. Agnostics, atheists, and skeptics will find her wise-ass insights a helpful lens through which to view the many forthrightly devout poems from this self-proclaimed black-belt-sinner-turned-nontraditional-Catholic. The imagery in this slim volume is often stunning—at a performance of a Mozart piece, the grand piano is “a sarcophagus that stores/whole flocks of birds, banks of cirrus clouds,/Egyptian forest groves”—and her lines are propulsive and rhythmic. Sinners Welcome examines weighty matters such as life and death with intelligence and dark humor. And the occasional descent into tedium is easily forgiven in light of the consistent gems found throughout.

Emily Fox Gordon

Are You Happy?

Riverhead Hardcover

Those who’ve witnessed faculty brats running amok on a small college campus will immediately recognize Houston memoirist Emily Fox Gordon and her preteen cohorts as they roam the grounds of fifties-era Williams College in Are You Happy? (A Childhood Remembered) (Riverhead), the follow-up to her well-reviewed debut, Mockingbird Years. Gordon paints an entertaining (although suspiciously detailed) portrait of her childhood as the not-entirely-miserable fat girl who disappoints her alcoholic mother and her dispassionate economy professor father. Young Emily doesn’t play piano or sports or do well in school; instead she and her friends sneak into poorly secured basements and explore their budding teen emotions. Gordon does her best to attach meaning and significance to her childhood memories, and she is a heck of a writer. But sixth-grade kissing games and misguided crushes don’t lend the sought-after gravitas to an otherwise pleasant literary remembrance.