Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Orner, Dermansky, Simic, Tate, and More

Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new titles from the likes of Peter Orner, Marcy Dermansky, Charles Simic, James Tate, and more—that are publishing this week.

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Maggie Brown & Others by Peter Orner

Here’s what  about : “‘I’m always interested in the way people edit the details of their lives, the way they compress all the years into sentences,’ says the narrator of one of this collection’s 44 powerful tales, expressing Orner’s talent for crafting captivating character sketches that read like memoirs. Loosely linked by their shared settings (Chicago; Fall River, Mass.) and characters, the stories comprise a mosaic of lives remarkable primarily for an ordinariness—one character reflects that ‘his friends, his family, considered him a failure, he knew, not a spectacular failure, a mundane, run-of-the-mill failure’—that occasionally is thrown into sharp relief by a dramatic incident, such as a near car crash that reveals the narrator’s true nature in ‘My Dead,’ or a young man’s taunting, in the title story, of a disaffected roommate whom he doesn’t know is carrying a gun. The final story, ‘Walt Kaplan Is Broke: