17 Best Books to Read This Spring

Might as well get the shock-and-awe premise out of the way: In Steve Erickson's Shadowbahn, his tenth novel and his first in half a decade, the twin towers mysteriously reappear in the South Dakota Badlands. Yes, just like that. And that's not even the most sensational part of this utterly Dalíesque, polyphonic rhapsody of a book. The skyscrapers immediately turn into a site of pilgrimage and preoccupations, a fulcrum around which Erickson spins characters, digressions, trippy road trips, pop crit and reveries. "'Cause what I'm telling here is your story, America, no use blaming it on me," Erickson writes, revealing both his sense of play and the sweeping intent of this one-of-a-kind work.