Beyond wonderful: Tom Perotta's collection, Bad Haircut. This is a series of coming of age stories all told from the perspective of the same boy, over a period of years, during the 1970s. They get better and better as you go--and are compact, observant, subtle, restrained, and often absolutely surprising. It is a positive joy to watch Perotta get from point A to point B in each tale--the route is never direct, and never predictable, and it always makes such perfect sense.

Hysterically funny and very, very sharp: Jincy Willett's The Writing Class. The main character teaches creative writing through the local university extension--and is herself an obvious extension of Willett (the posts on Willett's website are also the posts of the protagonist). There are some plot hitches--but the humor and the characterization more than compensate for them. Also--if you have ever either taught a writing class or taken one, you will love what Willett does with her treatment of teacher, students, and class dynamics. Finally, if you've ever kept a blog--or been a regular commenter on one--there's a very fun treatment of how online communities form and work, as well as how trolls factor into them.

Claustrophobic: Tom Perotta's Little Children. Novels that don't let you like any of the main characters but somehow compel you to keep reading anyway tend to get suffocating, at least for me. I dislike intensely what I am reading about--narcissistic, poorly compensated, overeducated, thirty-something suburban parents making hashes of their lives with affairs and other bad choices--and yet the novel is written so engagingly that I can't put it down. I am about half way through this novel--and it's stressing me out something awful.

In the stack: Jincy Willett's Jenny and the Jaws of Life and Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From.

You?