An Unfinished Season By Ward Just Houghton Mifflin, 251 pp., $24 Buy this book more books most popular most commented Personal Days by Elizabeth Hand The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York by Tom Robbins Welcome to New York Comic Con by Carol Cooper A Voice Poetry Roundup by Alan Gilbert Etgar Keret's Short-Story Overload by Michelle Orange Girls Love Gay Male Porn Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino My Boyfriend's Kink Is Getting Fat. What Do I Do? Savage Love by Dan Savage Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books Summer Guide by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Devo-Inspired Art in East Williamsburg (8) Maro The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo (5) Maria Luisa Tucker David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' (4) David Mamet Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (4) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard

It's a familiar coming-of-age narrative, a politically aware Catcher without all the alienation-speak. But what sets An Unfinished Season apart is how subtly the author infuses the personal with the political and the way he steeps his sentences in the rhythms of 1950s jazz. Whereas in his earlier fiction and in his career as a newspaperman in Vietnam (documented in Michael Herr's Dispatches, as well as in his own memoirs), Just tackled abuses of power head-on, in this novel the politics are those of the human heart; the result is Just's most trenchant read to date. Above all, the book is a love letter to "a noisy, unlovely city of iron and concrete, a city on the grab, fundamentally lawless, its days spent chasing money and its nights spending it . . . an unlovely city, not unloved."