DISCOVERIES

PASS THE POLENTA: And Other Writings From the Kitchen, With Recipes. By Teresa Lust (Steerforth Press: 270 pp., $24)

Like Laurie Colwin and M.F.K. Fisher before her, and many a practical cook before them both, Teresa Lust goes gunning for haute cuisine. “I did not inherit a silver palate through good breeding,” she writes in this hearty collection of essays on food and family, “and I could not create one through perseverance. I blame,” she writes proudly, “the whole sorry truth on my grandmother’s garden.” Her mother’s polenta, her Aunt Nana’s pies, her friend Mary’s scones, her Aunt Lena’s bread, her mother’s cousin Giuseppina’s risotto and even her father’s cioppino are also to blame. Lust has heritage. Hers is a long line of Italian cooks in Washington state, killing chickens, picking apples, rolling pie crust and serving polenta. She has cooked in restaurants across the country, which has given her a healthy skepticism for the whims of restaurant owners and a fond ear for customer’s anecdotes. Cooking to please is not as evident as pleasure in cooking, a belief in being true to a recipe’s history, and to its main ingredients, which are nothing less than characters in her story.

THE STILLEST DAY. By Josephine Hart (Overlook Press: 210 pp., $23.95)

This new novel, like Hart’s previous books, “Damage,” “Sin” and “Oblivion,” is very much a study of restraint and the havoc it can wreak in the soul. Bethesda Barnet is a painter who lives alone with her mother in a small village somewhere in England in a time that resembles the 19th century. She makes Jane Austen’s characters look unbuttoned. She makes Henry James’ characters look outspoken, even rude. Underneath boils that unquenchable desire that will be her unbuttoning. The man she will blame it on is Mathew Pearse, who moves in next door with his very pregnant wife, Mary. On the stillest day, Mary, visiting Bethesda’s mother, enters the room in which lie hidden the obsessive paintings Bethesda has made of Mathew. Mary has a heart attack, and before it is clear that she has died, mother and daughter perform a caesarean that will save the baby’s life and end Mary’s. Mathew, suspecting foul play, and no longer capable of love, sets about ruining what’s left of Bethesda’s life, which ends in a convent, where a not-so-benevolent patron has set her up with a studio and a vow of silence. Once she is in the convent, the novel degenerates into a chorus of voices that give the feel of madness but are a little too cacophonous. Hart has captured the ruined life, the threat and danger of a woman’s yearning and that Medusa-like creature, destined for literary punishment: the unwomanly woman.

GHOST TOWN: A Novel. By Robert Coover (Henry Holt: 148 pp., $21.95)

“He is not much of a dreamer. When he’s awake he’s awake, and when he sleeps he sleeps.” Of course there are exceptions in the desert dirt character of Robert Coover’s cowboy, adrift in this fantastic fable--part myth, part comedy, part movie, part book. “Gazing past the sweet black hillock of her haunch at the field of throbbing stars in the moonless sky beyond and thinking: I am wholly lost and I am not who I thought I was.” Is this the definition of cowboy or what? Coover’s young cowboy wanders into a town with a shortage of lawmakers and is elected sheriff, like everything, against his will. It’s a town without morals, with a chanteuse who wants him bad and a schoolmarm he thinks he loves. Still, all he wants is to get back on his mustang and head across the desert. But civilization, as Huckleberry Finn found, is sticky. This book is a crazy dream, so familiar and funny, such a steadfast cradle of a plot that Coover can just rock his characters to sleep in it, let his twinkling sentences wink and nod and nudge with only an ominous landscape for a God. It’s the very absence of God that makes a reader feel like a kid again, playing cowboys and Indians, deciding on his very own how to behave and what is the right thing to do next.

BIRDS OF AMERICA: Stories. By Lorrie Moore (Alfred A. Knopf: 288 pp., $23)

Lorrie Moore, author of “Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?,” has something that many writers of her generation don’t have: She is truly odd. Her characters--an-out-of-work actress on the lam from Hollywood, a mother and daughter on vacation in Ireland, a young boy with cystic fibrosis, a woman whose parents were killed in a car accident, a woman whose cat has died, an unlikely gay couple, a woman who accidentally killed a baby--find affection in unlikely places. Many have children tugging at their hearts. You end up liking people you didn’t think you’d like, which always, in life and fiction, lifts the spirits. Moore’s stories don’t leave us in the solitary confinement that oddity can create, the way Diane Arbus did in her photographs, or Flannery O’Connor in her stories. They are the dance halls and constellations in which eccentricity becomes uniqueness.

BELONG TO ME: Stories. By Kai Maristed (Random House: 222 pp., $22)

For those of us who haven’t lived around them, horses are dream creatures, the perfect backdrop to a story, the perfect furniture on which to drape relationships, conflicts, fears and small victories. And so they appear in Kai Maristed’s stories, whose characters work and live around horses. In “Blue Horse,” a young girl is kidnapped and held prisoner for several years by a brute she comes to need and hate until she forgets how to escape. A horse in the garden of one of his prisons illuminates the strange line between freedom and enslavement that can warp a fine animal. In “How to Float,” a boy sacrifices an important piece of his own life to help his mother by staying home to help what’s called a floater clean their horses’ teeth on the day before his final exams. In the process, he also learns the fatal skill of manipulating women. In “Autofocus,” a woman hired to kill a polo player falls in love with him instead. Horses, bought, sold, ridden, cared for, running or standing still are constant reminders of something fine and thrilling at the core of life.