Five books published in the last five years you might regret not reading:

For most of my life, I’ve been one of those dyed-in-the-wool true believers that any work of literature written after John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces probably isn’t worth reading. Over the last few years I’ve been surprised to find that my blithe rejection of the contemporary literary scene isn’t that defensible after all. Here is a list of five books of different genres from the last five years that have helped make me change my mind.

John Darnielle, Wolf in White Van). I’ve been listening to Darnielle’s band The Mountain Goats obsessively for about seven years straight, so I’m not exactly an unbiased observer of his artistic work. But Darnielle has done the almost-impossible: a singer-songwriter has leapt the chasm between short-form poetic songs to a long-form novel and succeeded wildly. His compact novel about a horribly and mysteriously maimed paper-and-pen game designer is a superb and elegantly written exploration of the demons we create and our desire to control them.

Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn. I’m not usually a big fan of military fiction, but Marlantes’ unexpected and gripping novel about a second lieutenant’s first months in the Vietnam War made me lose sleep for days on end. Loosely structuring his work with themes from the Arthurian legend of Parsifal, he creates a novel of human insight and literary merit.

Nathan Poole, Father Brother Keeper. Poole’s debut collection of short stories deserves as much attention as it can get. The story that got me hooked, “A Map of the Watershed,” uses the techniques of the short-story genre with an easy excellence that justly allows comparison to masters like Ambrose Bierce or Flannery O’Connor. I only wish there were more than twelve stories in the book.

A.E. Stallings, Olives. Poetry dropped off my reading list for a few years, but a generous friend’s recommendation of Stallings’ work has restored the form’s rightful place in my heart. Her work is sonorous, metrically rich, and elegant, whether she’s talking about telephones or funeral stelae. And for what it’s worth, her “Persephone to Psyche” may be the best literary take on that myth since Lewis’ Till We Have Faces.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King. Okay, this one is kind of cheating because it was written before Wallace’s death in 2008, but it was only published in 2011. Undoubtedly his most religious work, this chaotic, unfinished work about a tax office uses an unpromising theme—boredom—to reveal the secret longing for faith at the heart of secular doubt. Even for Wallace, it’s a treasure.

Gabriel Torretta, O.P., is a Dominican priest serving as parochial vicar at St. Gertrude’s Parish in Cincinnati, Ohio. He recently completed a thesis entitled “Beholding Beauty: A Theological Aesthetics of Deification.” Before entering the Order of Preachers, he studied pre-modern Japanese literature at Columbia. Before that, well, he read books.