LitVoyeur (Online)

November 2011 Pick: In these spellbinding stories, Yiyun Li, a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award winner, a MacArthur Fellow, and one of "The New Yorker"'s top 20 fiction writers under 40, gives us exquisite stories in which politics and folklore magnificently illuminate the human condition. A professor introduces her middle-aged son to a favorite student, unaware of the student's true affections. A lifelong bachelor finds kinship with a man wrongly accused of an indiscretion. Six women establish a private investigating agency to battle extramarital affairs in Beijing. Written in lyrical prose and with stunning honesty, "Gold Boy, Emerald Girl "introduces us to worlds strange and familiar, creating a mesmerizing and vibrant landscape of life.

August 2011 Selection: Greece, 1940. In the port city of Salonika, with its wharves and brothels, dark alleys and Turkish mansions, a tense political drama is being played out. "Spies of the Balkans" is a stunning novel about a man who risks everything to fight back against the world's evil.

June 2011 Selection: When faith and facts collide, Jo March--a young woman born into an Evangelical Christian dynasty--wrestles with questions about who she is and how she fits into the weave of her faithful family. Chasing loose threads that she hopes will lead to the truth, Jo sets off on an unlikely quest across boundaries of language and religion, through chasms of sectarian divides in the Muslim world. Against the backdrop of the War on Terror--travelling from California to Chicago, Pakistan to Iraq--she delves deeply into the past, encountering relatives, often for the first time, whose histories are intricately intertwined with her own . . . only to learn that true spiritual devotion is a broken field riddled with doubt and that nothing is ever as it seems. A story of forbidden love and familial dysfunction that interweaves multiple generational and cultural viewpoints, "The Sweetness of Tears" is a powerful reminder of the ties that bind us, the choices that divide us, and the universal joys and tragedies that shape us all.

October 2010 Selection: This Is Where I Leave You is Jonathan Tropper's most accomplished work to date, and a riotously funny, emotionally raw novel about love, marriage, divorce, family, and the ties that bind-whether we like it or not.

August 2010 Selection: In this deeply affectionate and fiercely funny coming-of-age novel, Whitehead, using the perpetual mortification of teenage existence and the desperate quest for reinvention, beautifully explores racial and class identity, illustrating the complex rhythms of the adult world.

May 2010 Selection: Palahniuk depicts Midwestern life through the eyes of Pygmy, a thoroughly-indoctrinated little killer who hates America with a passion, in this cunning double-edged satire.

March 2010 Selection: The publishers of Cleave's new novel don't want to spoil the story by revealing too much about it. They will say that the beach scene is brutal, and that it braids the fates of a 16-year-old Nigerian orphan and a well-off British couple.