This cover image released by Chelsea Green Publishing shows "A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth" by Chris Smaje. (Chelsea Green Publishing via AP)

“A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth,” by Chris Smaje (Chelsea Green)

With the possible exception of parks, perhaps no use of the land is viewed more favorably in America than a small farm. It encompasses all the values and myths we hold holy — seemingly pollution-free stewardship of the land, green vistas of vibrant crops, and contented animals munching grass.

If only the realities and economics of small farming were so engaging.

The vast scope and power of corporate agriculture presents ferocious competition; studies show half of small farmers depend on a second job to stay solvent.

Chris Smaje explains in “A Small Farm Future” how small farms can become profitable — it merely will take a near complete reordering of our society.

Smaje threw his research net wide for this book, citing population growth, climate change, conflicting economic theories and outdated politics in concluding the labor-intensive, small-scale agriculture he advocates can work.

Forget any multi-tasking when you are reading this book — you’ll get lost in equations he creates to show the flow of commodities and money and how the world can change to embrace small farms.

Smaje offers a solution for small farms on a macro-economic/political scale; the aspiring small farmer will not find much here to help make the venture profitable.

“A Small Farm Future” joins a barnful of books and articles in recent years on small farming, a romance with the land that has eluded profitability.

However, several factors may hasten Smaje’s farm revolution, at least in the United States:

• Climate change, which will render some of our current farmlands too hot, too dry, or both.

• The diminishing water table in California’s central and Salinas valleys, where most of America’s salads originate in industrial-scale farms.

• Washing away of the topsoil in the Great Plains, the result of corn and soybean monocultures and failure to plant cover crops, such as clover, in the winter to hold the soil in place when it rains.

• In California, a failure of the winter rains, and conversely, deluges in the central states, surely will elevate the urgency of an alternative agriculture discussion.

If those factors are not enough to ignite a shift to more sustainable small farms, consider this statistic: Federal payments to farmers are expected to reach a record $46 billion this year, the New York Times reported earlier this month. That’s about 40 percent of total farm income.

As Smaje writes: “It’s clear that present ways of doing politics, economics and agriculture in much of the world are reaching the end of the line.”

•••

“Memorial,” by Bryan Washington (Riverhead Books)

“Memorial,” by Bryan Washington, follows the complex relationship between Benson, a Black day care teacher, and Mike, a Japanese American chef.

The couple live together in Texas, and for all intents and purposes, they are in love. Lately, though, their relationship has felt strained, and as issues with their respective families become more pressing, their lives together only grow more complicated.

Mike’s mother arrives for a visit at the same time Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Japan. So, he leaves Benson alone to live with his mother in their apartment and travels to be with his father.

Benson’s time with Mike’s mom, as well as Mike’s time navigating his relationship with his father, prove to be transformative for both men.

“Memorial” is a powerful portrait of the challenges, both internal and external, that so often come with loving another human being. With unique and beautiful prose, it weaves together a fascinating story of cultures, families, and lovers both clashing and coming together in the beautiful mess that is loving and living.

While the characters feel lost and out of control, the story, itself, never does. Washington has a strong and purposeful command over every moment. With its soft prose and alternating perspectives, “Memorial” feels like a dance, effortlessly gliding between the characters’ stories as they discover who they are supposed to be.

•••

“To Be a Man,” by Nicole Krauss (HarperCollins)

After publishing four novels to great acclaim, Nicole Krauss has come out with her first collection of short fiction, “To Be a Man,” and the results are decidedly mixed. Word for word, she writes beautiful sentences but sometimes the stories don’t add up to much. Or they devolve into dreamy self-absorption, mysticism and apocalyptic dread.

A woman stays in her dead father’s apartment, where a ghostly stranger has taken up residence. Two friends exchange memories of watching a film. New York goes on terror alert, and a couple has drunken sex. Time and again, she revisits a few familiar themes: the burden of Jewish history, the legacy of the Holocaust, families split between the U.S. and Israel, sexual violence.

In “Switzerland” a woman remembers a girl she knew in boarding school whose sexual adventurousness bordered on recklessness. The decades-old memories are triggered by watching her 12-year-old daughter fearlessly stare down a lecherous man on the subway and remembering her own realization, around the same age, “that the power to attract men … arrives with a terrifying vulnerability.”

“The Husband” is a charming, bittersweet tale about an old man who shows up at a widow’s door in Tel Aviv improbably claiming to be her lost husband, and the struggle of the woman’s adult daughter to accept him even after it becomes clear that he is a benign presence in their family.

“Has Israel become so broken and corrupt,” she thinks to herself in a hilarious riff, “that having failed to put aside the resources to take care of the very people it was founded to provide refuge for… that some crackpot in the administration… has hatched the crooked plot to deliver these poor old uncared-for people to innocent people’s doors?”

“End Days,” which takes place as wildfires bear down on a California community, centers on the break-up of a couple’s 25-year marriage for reasons only hinted at, and how it leads, improbably, to the sexual awakening of their teenage daughter with the most unlikely of partners.

In the last story, a woman sits on a beach watching her sons play on a jetty. She thinks about the stories she has told them many times about their births; and how, as they grew older, they wanted to hear her side of it, “what an act of terrible strength it took to push them into the world.” The passage goes on for almost a page, just one example of the granular detail and operatic intensity Krauss brings to this work.

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