There’s wonder in water.

Whether we’re gazing across a mirror-smooth lake or bouncing over crashing ocean waves or simply skipping stones across a swiftly moving stream, we find wonder in water. There’s a quiet power to it, an energy that is as undeniable as it is indefinable. There is joy and knowledge and yes, there is magic.

Maine author Ellen Booraem offers up some of that wonder in her new book “River Magic” (Dial Books, $16.99), her latest offering for younger readers. This fantasy tale – aimed at readers 10-12, but accessible to readers on either side of that range – is a story of what happens when magic intrudes on real life. It’s a story about grief and loss and the many ways – some healthy, some not so much – that we deal with those feelings.

It’s also about thunder mages and dragons, a story of inadvertent adventure that celebrates the meaning of family and friendship even as it offers wild weirdness aplenty.

True literary excellence is rare. At any given time, there exists a relative handful of writers capable of creating legitimately exceptional prose. There are plenty of GOOD writers out there (though perhaps not as many as we might like), but scant few GREAT ones.

The truly excellent are the ones who are not only capable of crafting greatness, but are also willing to push boundaries – both the establishment’s and their own. These are the writers who, in continuing to challenge themselves, burst through the literary ionosphere and hurtle toward undiscovered realms.

Zadie Smith is one such writer.

Few writers today have been working the cultural criticism beat as long and as successfully as Chuck Klosterman. To many, his is THE voice when it comes to pop analysis and contextualization. But while his latest book might explore some of those same ideas, it does so through a different literary lens.

“Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction” (Penguin, $26) offers the same sort of quick-hit cleverness that permeates Klosterman’s nonfiction, but via a delivery medium of short fiction. Flash fiction, really – none of the 34 pieces that make up this collection is more than a handful of pages and some are considerably shorter.

The book’s subtitle is an accurate one – the tales contained within are brief, fictionalized explorations of the same ideas and hypotheticals that feature prominently in Klosterman’s nonfiction work. They are strange and offbeat, small and skewed glimpses of the zeitgeist through weird-colored glasses – think “Twilight Zone” or “Black Mirror,” only in a much bigger hurry. And while they vary in length, style and tone, all of them ring loudly with the author’s distinctive voice.

Short story collection finds the exquisite within the unpleasant

People sometimes forget that you don't have to shock to scare.

You can scare with shock if you choose, of course, but too often, we forget that sometimes subtlety can be just as scary or even scarier than overt in-your-face tactics. In fact, some of the most frightening tales ever put to page rely on a subtle intensity designed to draw you into their own world rather than shock you out of your own.