Rumi’s Secret, by Brad Gooch (Harper). Rumi, the great Persian poet, was a religious scholar in Anatolia when, in 1244, he encountered a man named Shams who recognized him as “a poet and a mystic, not a gatekeeper for rules.” Their friendship transformed Rumi’s life, and transports this biography into an exquisite, joyous realm. Shams, gruff and guileless, badgered Rumi into risking a more vulnerable approach to the concealed and inexpressible—that is, the essence of God and of love. Gooch narrates their friendship as a love story gone awry: Rumi releases his most uninhibited poetic self only after Shams disappears. Thankfully, more nurturing, less abrasive friendships followed, allowing Rumi to compose the spiritually pantheistic, enigmatic, and witty work for which he is famous.
The Men in My Life, by Patricia Bosworth (Harper). In this memoir of the fifties and sixties, a biographer of Hollywood stars recounts her early life as a Broadway and film actress. Although she comes across as a fiercely ambitious and restless young woman, she emphasizes the role of luck, good and bad; she won a movie role as a nun on the strength of a photo, but had to prepare for the part while recovering from a black-market abortion. Bosworth’s command of detail—the butterflies on her wedding dress, the caramel she spoons out during a waitressing gig, Diane Arbus’s habit of wearing clothes until they’re in shreds, a workshop scene with a randy Steve McQueen—makes the book more than merely a dishy showbiz memoir.
The Moravian Night, by Peter Handke, translated from the German by Krishna Winston (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The protagonist of this novel about storytelling is a retired writer, who, returning from an expedition across Europe, summons friends to his houseboat, in Serbia (the title of the book is the boat’s name), to hear an all-night retelling of his tour. With allusions to “The Arabian Nights,” Cervantes, and Chaucer, his tale weaves memory, dream, philosophy, and illusion. Locations, names, and relationships are often left to the imagination, but there is a persistent sense that “momentous things must have occurred, and apparently almost every minute.” The theme of the book is self-examination, and the way that our lives are shaped by the land beneath our feet.
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, by Chanelle Benz (Ecco). This début short-story collection moves through a hodgepodge of settings and periods, depicting characters on the edge of society and of disaster. A teen-age girl turns bank robber in the Wild West; a formerly enslaved poet makes a perilous journey through the antebellum South; a young monk struggles to hold on to his faith during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Savagery pervades what one character calls a “world for whose wickedness there is no remedy.” Full of archaisms, the language has a neo-Nabokovian extravagance, occasionally overindulgent. While Benz’s execution is a little uneven, her unconventional tales consistently startle and charm.
Correction note: An earlier version misspelled the last name of the translator Krishna Winston.
