“‘So much sordidness,’ agrees Arthur, relapsing into his chair. ‘It quite saps a fellow.’”What fatigues Arthur proves to be of sheer delight for readers. With no disregard for the novel’s considerable literary merit, The Wildes is, above all else, splendidly entertaining.

The fictional killer, an itinerant taxi driver named Paul Biga, is arrested and convicted of committing 12 murders in and around the Barrow State Forest region between 1990 and 1997. The stories in Highway Thirteen flit in and out of that timeframe.

Readers are unlikely to come upon another book on this topic that so thoroughly explores its checkered past and describes in such detail the behind-the-scenes maneuvering that ushered in what we now blithely accept as reality TV.

The novel’s opening pages—first narrated by Lakesha (soon caught up in the throes of office politics), then Mark, back to Lakesha, and so on—are marked by brisk prose and closely observed insights. But during Mark’s journey to England, a long stretch of exposition about soccer and related matters threatens to stall the narrative’s forward motion.

While Ito’s short stories are small blips, his themes surrounding time, memory, relationships, among others, transport the reader to alternate realities. His unique manga style plays off of heavy body horror that shocks the eyes.

My friend of over three decades tried to comfort me and her soldier husband: three tours, two in Afghanistan, one in Iraq, a navy-blue sweatshirt boasting an Airborne patch, a bracelet saying Remember The Fallen circling his wrist, a black, rubber ring dark on his calloused hand, the kind soldiers wear to honor others who’ve served or lost their lives in combat.

Soon after the translators convene in Irena Rey’s village on the outskirts of the Białowieża forest in eastern Poland, “Our Author” makes an initial, harrowing appearance (as she has done with her translators many times before). Then, quite inexplicably, she vanishes.

There may be better places to sound for depth, to mine for connections, to steep oneself in the near-eternal and give the ultracontemporary world the slip, than Edgewater, New Jersey. But from just outside my three rented rooms on Undercliff Avenue, through the rusty sideways diamonds of the staggering fence that runs along the walk and separates the occasional pedestrian from the oil tanks and cranes below, there is much to consider.

How do you imagine the unimaginable? How do you write about it? That’s the task investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen sets for herself in Nuclear War: A Scenario, her hypothetical account of nuclear warfare and the end of the world as we know it.