Opinion

Required reading

Vampires in the Lemon Grove

by Karen Russell (Knopf)

“Swamplandia!” author Russell has a wonderful talent for combining the real with the fantastical or absurd and making it seem believable. One tale — “The Barn at the End of Our Term” — in her new story collection has a group of 11 ex-presidents reincarnated as horses on a farm. There, John Adams is trying to organize an escape. In “The New Veterans,” we meet an Iraq war vet who tattoos the death-scene of a comrade on his back, which a masseuse finds she can manipulate. And the title tale is a love story about a vampire couple who call a picturesque Italian lemon grove home.

House of Earth

by Woody Guthrie (Infinitum Nihil/Harper)

What a combo! Johnny Depp and Woody Guthrie. The never-before-published novel Guthrie wrote at his Coney Island home in 1947 is the first offering from Depp’s new imprint. Set in the Dust Bowl of the Texas Panhandle, it’s the story of poor farmers Tike and Ella Mae Hamlin, who live in a rundown wooden shack on land they don’t own. When Tike finds a government pamphlet telling how to build an adobe home (his house of earth), it’s his dream to do just that, hoping to live in a place where the wind and dirt won’t find it’s way in through the cracks. This belongs on a shelf alongside Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” and is a fine accompaniment to the recent Ken Burns documentary on PBS, “The Dust Bowl.”

The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

by Teddy Wayne (Free Press)

The latest novel from Wayne (“Kapitoil”) is a coming-of-age story, keeping in mind the reality-show fame-fishbowl age we live in. Jonny is an 11-year-old Justin Bieber-like megastar — complete with a fawned-over hairdo — whose party-mad mom is his manager. We follow them on a cross-country tour, finding that while Jonny is precocious when it comes to the industry and a lifestyle full of hangers-on and handlers, he really is just a kid.

Detroit

An American Autopsy

by Charlie LeDuff (The Penguin Press)

Pulitzer-winning journalist LeDuff,hasn’t piled on to down-and-out Detroit. He’s immersed himself, moving back to the hometown where his mother’s flower shop was firebombed on the pre-Halloween “Devil’s Night,” and where he lost his sister to the streets. His Detroit includes corrupt pols, deserted homes and abandoned factories — one where a homeless man was found frozen, encased in a block of ice.

The Promise of Stardust

by Priscille Sibley (William Morrow)

Debut novelist Sibley has an important day job — she’s a neonatal intensive-care nurse — and she tackles an issue she must have encountered on the job: medical ethics. Dr. Matt Beaulieu’s brilliant professor and former-astronaut wife, Elle, falls off a ladder and into a coma. Brain dead, doctors discover she is also pregnant. The only way to save the unborn child is to keep the Elle on life support for six months — against her previously expressed wishes. An ensuing court and family battle recalls the Terri Schiavo case.