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Article snippet: We’re nearing the season for ghost stories — or, in the case of William Alexander’s new middle-grade novel, “A Properly Unhaunted Place,” un-ghost stories, cautionary tales about what happens when we try too hard to put our history behind us. Eleanor Henderson’s “The Twelve-Mile Straight” and Josephine Rowe’s “A Loving, Faithful Animal” wrestle with the enduring trauma of violence over generations, and Alice McDermott’s “The Ninth Hour” draws narrative power from that perennial burden of Catholicism, shame. Two finalists for the National Book Awards appear on this week’s list: Frank Bidart’s collected poems, “Half-Light,” and Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection of stories, “Her Body and Other Parties.” You have until the awards are announced on Nov. 15 to finish them. Go! Radhika JonesEditorial Director, Books FRESH COMPLAINT: Stories, by Jeffrey Eugenides. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27.) Eugenides’s first collection of short stories is his first book since “The Marriage Plot” in 2011. “Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, Eugenides writes like a man who is enjoying himself. The feeling is contagious,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “The comedy in these stories derives from the fact that these people are not quite ready for this world — or at least not ready for what this world has become. Innocence everywhere has been trampled.” ADMISSIONS: Life as a Brain Surgeon, by Henry Marsh. (Thomas Dunne Books, $26.99.) Like “Do No Harm,” Marsh’s previous memoir,... Link to the full article to read more