Burn Man

Whenever I am championing Jarman's "funny, cluttered, driven" novel, Salvage King, Ya!—I sometimes feel that I am its only champion, though it deserves many more—I say something to the effect of, "But he's better known for his stories." And here those stories are, 21 of them gloriously collected from four decades of writing. It is an intense experience to read them all in a row, because they are each so intensely packed. The comparisons to two of Jarman's heroes (and mine), Denis Johnson and Barry Hannah, are inevitable, for their funny, fragmented brilliance, their simmering (often more than simmering) violence, and their portraits of men (usually) at the fraying ends of various ropes. You won't find much more firepower per square inch in any other book this year.