HOT TYPE ELISSA SCHAPPELL

If writers are to be believed, and writers, like tree frogs, are early indicators of impending crisis, the apocalypse is nigh. In Sigrid Nunez'sSalvation City (Riverhead), set in the not-so-distant future, in the wake of a flu pandemic that has sparked global upheaval, an orphaned boy raised by secular liberals is rescued by an evangelical Christian pastor and his wife from the community of Salvation City. the pleasjy While they joyously anticipate the beginning of End Days, the boy, Cole, is forced to forge his own identity and vision of the future. Given the recent H1N1 outbreak and the tragic escalation in the culture wars, Salvation City is not only timely and thought-provoking but also generous in its understanding of human nature. When the apocalypse comes, I want Nunez in my lifeboat.

Two of this fall’s most arresting and vibrant new voices in fiction have stories that are also set in worlds foreign to most. The mean streets of Jackson Heights, Queens, are the turf of the teenage drug-dealing hero of Matt Burgess's electrifying Dogfight, a Love Story (Doubleday). In Patricia Engel's unforgettable Vida (Grove), New Jersey is home to a Latina girl and her family of “spies in a town of blancos.” Perhaps most unfamiliar to readers is the cloistered literary world in Lan Samantha Chang's novel All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost (Norton), a portrait of the shifting bonds between a seductive and notoriously punishing poetry professor and two of her grad students—one a handsome striver of early promise, the other a hermetic purist. Why can’t we all just get along? Also this month: Kwame Anthony Appiah, president of the PEN American Center, argues that the age-old power of The Honor Code (Norton) still has the moral capacity to reform civilization. Speaking of reform, the 2008 election shook up the goodold-boy network—Salon’sRebecca Traister looks at the impact of this historical upheaval in Big Girls Don’t Cry (Free Press). Hasta la vista, Ramona: plucky li’l yuppie-in-training Frannie returns in AJ Stern's rollicking Check, Please! (Grosset & Dunlap). All hail Jon Stewart and The Daily Show’s Earth (Grand Central), a space-alien-friendly guide to humankind that lacks only an entry on How to Serve Man.