Jane Smiley

Considering her Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres, a deft recasting of Shakespeare’s King Lear in the cornfields of Iowa, Jane Smiley knows very well how to spin good fiction from the human capacity for self-delusion and hubris. She attacks that theme from another angle in Good Faith (due in paperback May 11), in which greed, lust, and a fatal lack of self-awareness gnaw away at Joe Stratford, a 1980s real-estate agent presented with a get-rich-quick plan that, of course, just couldn’t be a scam. Though Joe’s fate is so obvious we correctly guessed it from reading the dust jacket, Smiley’s perspicacious prose kept us turning the pages happily. She’s also just come out with the memoir A Year at the Races, which expands on the love for equines she first wrote about in the novel Horse Heaven. Galleria, 3225 W. 69th St., Edina; (952) 920-0633; bn.com