THE ANGEL ESMERALDA: Nine Stories.By Don DeLillo. (Scribner, $24.) DeLillo’s first collection of short fiction, compiling stories written between 1979 and 2011, serves as a liberating reminder that terror existed long before there was a war on it. THE ART OF FIELDING. By Chad Harbach. (Little, Brown, $25.99.) This allusive, Franzen-like first novel, about a gifted but vulnerable baseball player, proceeds with a handsome stateliness.
THE BARBARIAN NURSERIES. By Héctor Tobar. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) A big, insightful novel about social and ethnic conflict in contemporary Los Angeles.
BIG QUESTIONS. Or, Asomatognosia: Whose Hand Is It Anyway? Written and illustrated by Anders Brekhus Nilsen. (Drawn & Quarterly, cloth, $69.95; paper, $44.95.) In this capacious, metaphysically inclined graphic novel, a flock of finches act out Nilsen’s unsettling comic vision about the food chain, fate and death.
THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC. By Julie Otsuka. (Knopf, $22.) Through a chorus of narrators, Otsuka unfurls the stories of Japanese women who came to America in the early 1900s to marry men they’d never met.
CANTI. By Giacomo Leopardi. Translated by Jonathan Galassi. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) With this English translation, Leopardi may at last become as important to American literature as Rilke or Baudelaire.
THE CAT’S TABLE. By Michael Ondaatje. (Knopf, $26.) Ondaatje grants that this novel, about three daring Ceylonese schoolboys on a sea journey to England, sometimes uses the “coloring and locations of memoir.”
CHANGÓ’S BEADS AND TWO-TONE SHOES. By William Kennedy. (Viking, $26.95.) In Kennedy’s most musical work of fiction, a newspaperman attains a cynical old-pro objectivity as Albany’s political machine pulls out the stops to head off a race riot in 1968.
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Illustration: R.O. Blechman
