Oh, I love Ian Frazier in any form, and I love Cursing Mommy in the New Yorker. The Cursing Mommy's Book of Days  by Ian Frazier is out now and he has joined all the columns together into a pretty good light novel. It just makes me happy.

     A. M. Homes' new book,  May We Be Forgiven,  is long, but worth the time. It's gotten mixed reviews, so I wonder if everybody read all the way to the end. (You kind of have to do that).  The title is from the Yom Kippur prayer - why will become apparent upon reading. Hapless Harold, who has always felt second-fiddle to his semi-sociopath baby brother George, ends up taking charge of George's family after he goes to prison. The real star of the book is George's son, Nate.

      Also, new in Southern Gothic; American Ghost by Janis Owens. Concerns present-day Florida Panhandle, what everyone calls Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings territory, both present-day and Depression-era. Yes, there's a lynching. Plus a love story and several Bible-thumping preachers. Anybody that likes Carolyn Haines should like this.

      New in fiction: Gun Church, by Reed Farrell Coleman, author of the Moe Prager mysteries.  A former literary wunderkind, burnout from the coke-fueled Eighties (we're supposed to infer a Brat Packer a la Bret Easton Ellis), has ended up teaching English in a community college in upstate New York (rusticated!). He foils a school shooting in his own classroom, enters the news again, AND is prosyletised into a local cult, the Gun Church, that revolves around gun culture. The plot moves quickly from there, including a semi-digression concerning a former IRA gunman, into a quick and clever conclusion. Well worth reading, for thriller fans and others.