Miles Davis, 1955, from Dreamer with a Thousand Thrills (Powerhouse), by Patricia Bosworth. Photograph by Tom Palumbo.

Tobias Wolff once lamented that “when people use the word ‘Nam’ it’s like salt on a slug.” But a recent spate of fiction about contemporary war (Redeployment, Green on Blue) signals an end to the combat clichés. Onto this fertile ground parachutes Will Mackin’s Bring Out the Dog (Random House). A U.S. Navy veteran with five combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan under his belt, Mackin also produces the kind of simultaneously sharp and ethereal writing that caused George Saunders to bless him with a story-length blurb. On one page of Mackin’s debut are “Taliban [leaping] from the ditch”; on the next, “Time passed mysteriously inside the clouds.”

Pencils down, brushes up: Tom Rachman goes beyond the base coat with The Italian Teacher (Viking), a portrait of a son and his large-scale father. Susan Ronald unveils the unscrupulous Florence Gould in A Dangerous Woman (St. Martin’s). Flames can’t burn the memory of masterpieces: Peggy Cooper Cafritz’s art collection is Fired Up! Ready to Go! (Rizzoli Electa). Nimble novelist Lynne Tillman sees both Men and Apparitions (Soft Skull). Art and love are the Trick (Europa), by Domenico Starnone. Duncan Hannah’s Twentieth-Century Boy (Knopf) is a gallery of the louche, the lurid, and the illuminating. Iris Apfel’s Accidental Icon (Harper Design) is spectacular.

Photograph by Tim Hout.

In Short

The secret’s out with Uzodinma Iweala’s Speak No Evil (Harper). Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o takes to Wrestling with the Devil (New Press) after incarceration in Kenya. Anna Badkhen gets her hooks into Senegal in Fisherman’s Blues (Riverhead). Happiness (Atlantic Monthly) is reading Aminatta Forna’s foxy fare. Jesse Ball takes an experimental Census (Ecco). Curtis White was never Lacking Character (Melville House). Kate Greathead classes it up with her debut, Laura & Emma (Simon & Schuster). Robert D. Kaplan strategizes The Return of Marco Polo’s World (Random House). Matt Young turns up the testosterone in Eat the Apple (Bloomsbury). Friendship gets fraught in Rebecca Kauffman’s The Gunners (Counterpoint). Affection escalates in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair (Knopf). There’s always room for Roosevelts in Amy Bloom’s White Houses (Random House). Luis Alberto Urrea unfolds family lore in The House of Broken Angels (Little, Brown). Janice Kaplan and Barnaby Marsh roll some precise dice in How Luck Happens (Dutton). Michael Isikoff and David Corn hack Russian Roulette (Twelve). William I. Hitchcock turns on the Dwight light in The Age of Eisenhower (Simon & Schuster). Giants abound in Julia Pierpont’s The Little Book of Feminist Saints (Random House). Ali Cobby Eckermann isn’t Too Afraid to Cry (Liveright). V.F. contributor Katie Nicholl’s Harry (Hachette) is a ginger dish. Nathaniel Philbrick gets his Second Wind (Penguin). Andrew Lloyd Webber is Unmasked (Harper) in his colorful memoir. I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats!