I like memoirs as much as I like pure fiction, and a good one out now is Closing Time by Joe Queenan. Father was a mean drunk, grew up on and off welfare, but lacks the self-dramatizing, how-I-been-done-wrong-all-my-life tone of many of these efforts. A good, fast read, and funny in a lot of places.

A new writer named Albert Sanchez has a book out titled Pandora in the Congo, which is very good and readable even after it goes off into a semi-science-fiction tangent (I don't read science fiction much).