The discovery of a long-lost word in the stacks of a monastery library is a fabulist's dream. It could solve a puzzle, undo a spell or transport the finder to a new realm.

Kathleen Norris strives for all three in “Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life,” her latest exploration of divine grace and human purpose. Like her 1997 best-seller “The Cloister Walk,” the new book maps her spiritual journeys as a writer and a Benedictine oblate. The “marriage” in the subtitle, her union with fellow poet David Dwyer that ended with his 2003 death from pneumonia, takes Norris into terrain that will be new for her fans and appealing for novitiates.

Since her lonely adolescence in Honolulu, Norris has lived in perpetual ebbs and flows, from fervor to despondence, from creative burst to blockage, and then back again. “Monastic writers have always emphasized that maintaining a life of prayer means being willing to start over,” she writes. “Just when I seem to have my life in balance – I am picking myself up out of the ashes.”

In Ian Rankin's award-winning novels about John Rebus, the Scottish author has made the contrary Edinburgh police detective age with each outing. Now, more than 20 years and 17 novels later, Rankin is in his mid-40s, at the peak of his talents, but the moody Rebus nears the end of his career, partly because of the Scotland's mandatory retirement age of 60 for cops, partly because Rebus' lone-wolf style doesn't fit with the force's rank and file mentality.

In the powerful and unpredictable “Exit Music,” that retirement will become a reality in 10 days and that encroaching deadline infiltrates every conversation Rebus has, every moment of reflection. While Rebus is trying to tie up loose ends, he also refuses to go gently. When the murder of a “constructive dissident” Russian poet lands on Rebus' watch, he plunges in as if it were his first case. While the murder seems to have no motive, Rebus and Det. Sgt. Siobhan Clarke find a complicated case of conspiracies involving Russian businessmen and Scottish bankers and politicians. Adding to the mix is Rebus' longtime nemesis, Edinburgh crime boss “Big Ger” Cafferty.

Lynda Barry borrows the phrase “childhood and other neighborhoods” from poet Stuart Dybeck. Then, she gives the phrase her own spin in “What It Is,” Barry's delightful and hard-to-categorize book.

“It's a good way to start,” she writes about being creative, “by thinking of childhood as a place rather than a time ... like an unplayed-with-playset, needing only one thing to set all things in motion.”

Well, maybe two things, as it turns out: a willingness to resurrect memories and the desire to turn them into words and/or pictures. Being Lynda Barry, she does both and does both well.