TOY FIGHTS: A BOYHOOD, by Don Paterson (Faber, $39.99)
A memoir? Don Paterson? Don Paterson? The idea that Scotland’s phlegmatic laureate of gloom, the laconic sensei of Zen Calvinism, should drag out his entrails and read them for our edification across 400 pages of autobiographical prose seems, well, a bit unlikely. Bare his soul? I once saw him deliver an hour-long lecture to a transfixed – and slightly scared – freshman English class at the University of Aberdeen without removing his Crombie overcoat. Or
