Marriage By The Book: Five Tales Of Uncivil Union

• Read an excerpt of American Wife

Fine Just the Way it Is by Annie Proulx, Scribner, hardcover, 221 pages, list price: $25.00

If Brokeback Mountain's Ennis and Jack withered under the judgment of society, love here withers in below-zero temperatures. In "Them Old Cowboy Songs," just one of the stories in Brokeback author Annie Proulx's latest collection, marital bliss brings with it a stillborn infant delivered in isolation and left to be torn apart by wolves, while his mother bleeds out and his father freezes to death miles away. (Some honeymoon.) In "Tits-up in a Ditch," a bride's loveless marriage is presaged when she's forced to pay for her own bridal dinner, a modest affair at the diner where she works. And in "Testimony of the Donkey," a girl whose fiance has left her goes hiking alone for spite and winds up literally pinned between rocks and facing sure death.

It's always been the paradox of Proulx that the more serious the circumstances, the wryer her dark humor becomes. (Her attempts at overtly comic stories are the only flat notes in the bunch.) But despite the harsh circumstances, the stories themselves are improbable delights, their overwhelmingly bleak view of the lot of women summed up best by an observation of the nurse's aid in "Family Man," about a serial philanderer: "Women had to pretend to like men and to admire the things they liked. Her own sister had married a man who was interested in rocks, and now she had to drag around deserts and steep mountains with him."

The German Bride by Joanna Hershon, Ballantine, hardcover, 304 pages, list price: $25.00

After one ill-advised affair with an artist who paints her innocent portrait, teenager Eva Frank, a well-heeled Jewess in Berlin of 1865, finds herself on a wagon swaying toward Sante Fe. She's in the care of her new husband, following him across the ocean to outdistance the repercussions of their scandal. After one of their first nights on the trail, Eva and Abraham find they've made camp among the ripe carcasses of a recent massacre. This grim landscape sets the tone for the rest of their relationship, in which Abraham — who drinks, steals, whores and gambles away any savings they manage to accumulate — fails to live up to even one standard the pioneering Jewish husbands routinely provide for their new German wives. The depiction of this little-known community is itself fascinating, but Hershon avoids the pitfalls of fiction-cum-PBS documentary. Her research runs through the text skillfully, as elegant and imperceptibly woven as the threads in the white linen table service that Eva — both willful and guilt-ridden, sophisticated and ignorant — hauls all the way from Germany.

• Read an excerpt of Olive Kitteridge

Beginners Greek, by James Collins, Little, Brown & Company, hardcover, 448 pages, list price: $23.99

Although an innocent, finally requited love story is at the heart of James Collins' Beginner's Greek, far more compelling for the reader are the failed relationships revolving around it like so many bitter, arid moons. Peter and Holly meet on a plane, realize simultaneously that the other is "the one," then are separated by a series of minor misunderstandings. So much for Peter and Holly. But when they meet years later, complicating a straightforward, joyous reunion is the fact that Holly is now married to Peter's best friend, while Peter himself has taken up with a woman as joyless as Holly is enchanting. All around Holly and Peter lie figures felled by Cupid's errant bow, and in his depictions of the juicy vicissitudes of flawed love, Collins excels most at the cruel aside. The only false note in the book is the depiction of Peter and Holly themselves. Collins tries hard to make us root for them, but despite his best efforts, they remain waxen, unformed, as faceless as the white figures atop a wedding cake.

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Complete Holiday Book Recommendations 2008