GENERATION X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture By Douglas Coupland, St. Martin's, 183 pages, $17.99
In the 1991 novel that provided the name for the generation of North Americans born in the late 1950s and the 1960s, Andy and Dag and Claire migrate desultorily across the United States, living in rented accommodations and working at a series of "McJobs," low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, low-dignity, no-future jobs in the service industries. They tell each other stories, inventing fables for a modern age, tales of love, death, nuclear waste and mall culture.
EUNOIA By Christian Bök, Coach House, 113 pages, $16.95
Bök's imaginative and innovative work consists of five chapters of poetry - plus a few odds and ends - each chapter using only one of the five vowels in the English language. ("Eunoia," or beautiful thinking, is the shortest word in English containing all five vowels.) The results are sharp, amusing and thought-provoking, and surprisingly funny.
ON THE WATERFRONT By Budd Schulberg, Ivan R. Dee, 320 pages, $19.95
Okay, it's a novelization of the great movie of the same name. But what a novelization! What a novelist! And what a story, the gritty, moving tale of boxer Terry Malloy's fight against corruption in the ring and on the New Jersey docks. Schulberg's novel was published in 1955, and this edition includes the informative introduction written by the author in 1987.
CORVUS: A Life with Birds By Esther Woolfson, Granta, 337 pages, $17.95
The first corvid in Esther Woolfson's life was Chicken, a fledgling rook rescued by her daughter 16 years ago. Soon Chicken was sharing space in the house with Spike the magpie and Ziki the crow, and the three of them were hiding food in the walls and laying eggs in the living room. Woolfson, an award-winning Scottish short-story writer and broadcaster, tells the funny, touching story of her relationship with this intelligent, social and personable family of birds.