Made-up worlds Here’s a selection of fiction and poetry that Phoenix reviewers liked this year, in alphabetical order by author. COMPILED BY JON GARELICK

1) Frederick Barthelme, Elroy Nights (Counterpoint)

Frederick Barthelme’s typically ennui-afflicted art-professor protagonist moves deep into middle age — separating from his wife, having an affair with one of his stepdaughter’s friends, hitting the road from Biloxi to Memphis and Dallas. It’s funny, poignant, and written with a Flaubertian command of descriptive detail that relieves the pressure of mortality with comedy and grace.

2) Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis (Scribner)

Twenty-eight-year-old billionaire Eric Packer sets out on a limo trip across Manhattan in search of a haircut, all the while connected to a constant flow of data on his plasma screen, which is "soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process." As Packer moves at a snail’s pace in traffic, he borrows millions to raise his bet that the yen will go down. Funny, diamond-hard, Don DeLillo’s novel seems not of our time but ahead of it.

3) Leslie Epstein, San Remo Drive (Handsel Books)

In this "novel from memory," narrator Richard Jacobi — like Epstein — is the son of a famous Hollywood screenwriter (in Leslie’s case, Philip G. Epstein, who with his brother Julius wrote, among other films, Casablanca). Growing up with his emotionally disturbed brother, Barton, his bohemian mother, Lottie, and the father who will be destroyed by the blacklist and die young, Richard tells a story that explores all of Epstein’s themes in new ways — exile, the power of memory to liberate and oppress, eroticism’s profound power both to aid and to inhibit the creation of art, and the crushing, as well as the redemptive, power of history.

4) John Griesemer, Signal & Noise (Picador)

This fat historical novel, which opens in 1857, is centered on the creation of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. Mixing real and fictional characters, John Griesemer brings to life a time when momentous historic acts are possible and the future is bright. The cast includes investors, scientists, performers, and whores, most of whom have their eye on the big prize, history — whether they’re out to make it, witness it, or simply turn a quick buck in its reflected glory. This is a world of signal and noise, where communication misfires, unlikely connections knit life together, and history is what happens while great men are busy doing other things.

5) David Kirby, The Ha-Ha (Louisiana State University Press)

David Kirby’s book of poems draws its title from a visual trick of landscape architecture popular in 18th-century England, "a sunken fence used to keep cows at a picturesque distance/from the manor house so they can be seen grazing on the greensward/kept by the ha-ha/from trampling the lawn and mooing at the guests." In Kirby’s poetry, the ha-ha becomes a "structure against . . . chaos," as do the poems themselves — funny, anecdotal, demonstrating a juggler’s skill at keeping several metaphors in the air at once and bringing them together in finales that are both surprising and inevitable.

6) ZZ Packer, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (Riverhead)

Story collections about escape often promise exotic backdrops, but not ZZ Packer’s debut collection. Her itchy-footed narrators may fantasize about sipping coffee in Arabia or running libraries on desert islands, but in reality they spend most of their time in cities like Baltimore and Atlanta, in neighborhoods where urban renewal is always an election cycle away.

7) The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, edited by Sam Hamill and Bradford Morrow (Copper Canyon Press)

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) was an autodidact who liked to throw his weight around — even his milder opinions have a bullying edge. The 200-page The Dragon and the Unicorn (1944–1950) included here will make it clear whether this poet is for you. It’s not the woolly philosophizing that compels but his appetite for food, sex, architecture, nature. And the elegies for André and Delia Rexroth and the wholly invented "Love Poems of Mauricio" show how love animated the poet — even his tantrums.

8) John Updike, The Early Stories 1953–1975 (Alfred A. Knopf)

This is the boxed set, the completist artifact of the first half of John Updike’s career, with no previously unissued material but some remastering, the author "deleting an adjective here, adding a clarifying phrase there." The stories follow various protagonists through boyhood, marriage, fatherhood, and divorce, with religious faith and sexual desire intermingled in equal parts. In the process, Updike casts anew the multitude of details in our everyday emotional lives and physical surroundings.

9) Vendela Vida, And Now You Can Go (Alfred A. Knopf)

A 21-year-old newcomer to New York City, Ellis is approached by a polite young man in Riverside Park who then threatens her with a gun. After she talks him down, he lets her go, but the incident’s shockwaves ripple through her life in this unique take on post-traumatic stress.

10) Kevin Young, Jelly Roll: A Blues (Alfred A. Knopf)

In this book of 102 skinny and spare poems, Kevin Young does what all bluesmen must do: he makes the form his own. Jelly Roll goes way down the alley delivering songs in short lines of few words, fresh combinations that are audacious, funny, and piercing, as a blues must be to earn its place in the tradition.