Things Fall Apart
Fatema Ahmed
With two bodies of work recently reissued, now is a good time to wonder why novelist Patrick Hamilton is worth remembering.
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Tight Corners
Elaine Blair
When Richard Price moves from the urban ruins of New Jersey to the gentrified Lower East Side of Lush Life, things get complicated.
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In the Lost Realm of the Real
Carl Bromley
Michael Dibdin's detective Zen series sounds a melancholy note for an old Italy rife with political enemies.
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Searching for Traces
Ruth Scurr
There was little enthusiasm for revisiting the camps in Communist Hungary. Author Imre Kertész refracts that reluctance in fictional form.
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Dead Letters
William Deresiewicz
Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig saw himself as a Freud of fiction--a fellow spelunker in the caverns of the heart.
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The Age of the Wooden Spoon
Benjamin Lytal
The radical subjectivity and reckless politics of Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun find new expression in recent English translations and editions.
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The Counter-Family
Chris Lehmann
British author Jonathan Coe departs from grand social transformations and turns to the domestic sphere in The Rain Before It Falls.
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Man Out of Time
Mark Sorkin
In Hari Kunzru's captivating new novel My Revolutions, a former anti-Vietnam terrorist is dredged up after half a lifetime underground.
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Where Now? Let's Go!
Joanna Scott
The nonsensical funhouse of Donald Barthelme's fiction celebrates the cosmic joke of life and the pathos of grappling with it.
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Seems Like Old Times
Gary Phillips
This week's episode: Dieter Countryman reminisces about the good ol' days of selling the first Gulf War; Connie Waller gets his freak on in Vegas.
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Internal Combustion
Melissa Holbrook Pierson
Could Russell Banks be retooling himself as a fabulist?
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A Garden of Monsters
Carmen Boullosa : South America
The imaginary fascists in Roberto Bolaño's ironic encyclopedia Nazi Literature in the Americas bear a complex relationship to reality.
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Foes
William Deresiewicz : South Africa
J.M. Coetzee, now out with a new novel and a collection of essays, reminds us what a master he is at turning life into narrative.
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The Dot Matrix
Laila Lalami : Iraq
In I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, novelist Sinan Antoon explores themes of love, loss, identity and resistance in the face of political oppression.
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Fly Papers
Lorna Scott Fox : France
An English translation of Lydie Salvayre's The Power of Flies demonstrates how this novelist and practicing psychiatrist has earned more nervous respect than love in France.
2007
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Car Talk
A mock-heroic travelogue by Julio Cortázar and his wife captures the contemplative life on the road.
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Memorable Gestures
Michael Ondaatje shows off his trademark narrative tricks in his new novel Divisadero, but the magic is wearing thin.
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Many Exits
Philip Roth's Exit Ghost considers whether we're astonished by death or the life that precedes it.
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Rules of the Game
A fresh translation of a Portuguese classic offers a poignant portrait of a country's decline.
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Fukú Americanus
William Deresiewicz : Immigration to the US
Junot Díaz's masterful new novel maps the ambiguities in the modern immigrant experience in America.
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Playtime
The Surrealist dissident Raymond Queneau turned his writings into a lab for his experiments, and the results are still exhilarating.
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Revenants
In South African writer Zakes Mda's fiction, the past hovers like a ghost--seductive and terrifying.
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Gracelands
The taint of an unjust war tarnishes the lives of Vietnam-era Americans in Denis Johnson's stunning new novel.
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Dark Paradise
A trilogy of hard-boiled detective novels set in Marseilles contemplates the ethnic turmoil in modern-day France.
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My Bondage, My Freedom
Robert Walser's writing--opaque and ethereal, provoking and digressive--is finally being introduced to American readers.
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Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Epic
Lakshmi Chaudhry : Cultural Criticism & Analysis
The last book in J.K. Rowling's saga is marked by throwaway references to a post-9/11 world and derivative insights that never add up to a coherent moral vision.
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The Improbable Moralist
Leonard Michaels's fiction captured his evolution from sex-obsessed misogyny to self-identified moralism.
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Night on Earth
After Dark, Haruki Murakami's edgy new novel, describes how the lives of a group of strangers intersect over the course of one night.
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The Virtual Realist
Philip K. Dick has become the most influential and prophetic of late-twentieth-century science fiction writers.
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The Imaginary Jew
William Deresiewicz : Judaism & Jews
Two new novels, by Michael Chabon and Nathan Englander, recharge the modern Jewish experience with a sense of the exotic.
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The Wharton School
A new biography describes how Edith Wharton transformed her obsessions into stories of loss, regret and entrapment.
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The Dread Zone
It was never a question of whether, or even when, Don DeLillo would write a novel about 9/11. He has been writing it all along.
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Stranger in the City
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears tells the story of an Ethiopian immigrant's unrequited love affair with the American Dream.
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It's Doom Alone That Counts
Georges Simenon's remarkable output includes investigative journalism, hardboiled novellas and dark psychological novels.
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Humboldt's Gift
The comic novel Measuring the World re-imagines the lives of two of the nineteenth century's greatest scientists.
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The Things They Carried
The Bastard of Istanbul, a saga of two interwoven families, bravely violates Turkish taboo with its description of the Armenian genocide.
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Before the Law
Vivian Gornick : Judaism & Jews
Isaac B. Singer: A Life fails to fully illustrate the complexity of the writer's struggle with his heritage.
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Careful, He Might Hear You
In the Country of Men tells the story of a Libyan boy whose dissident father is wanted by the authorities.
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Free the Ulysses Two
Stephen Gillers : 1st Amendment
The time has come to clear the records of two women convicted of obscenity for publishing excerpts from Joyce's Ulysses.
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History Boy
The narrator of Martin Amis's House of Meetings describes the collapse of his soul through forty years of Soviet history.
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Bombay Confidential
Vikram Chandra's epic crime novel Sacred Games is an infernal history of India in the last decade.
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Tillie Olsen: 1912-2007
John Leonard : Feminism & Women
Celebrating the eloquence of the feminist, activist and writer in whose work memory, history, poetry and prophecy converge.
2006
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Uncle Tom's Shadow
Darryl Lorenzo Wellington : Slavery in America
The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin explores one of the most influential novels in American history.
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Getting Even
Roald Dahl's Collected Stories are best enjoyed by adult readers who take their humor black.
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Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind
Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day is actually four stories, each replete with brilliant patter, fancy footwork, wishful thinking and a plaintive ukulele.
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Half a Life
In The Lay of the Land, the final work in Richard Ford's acclaimed trilogy, Frank Bascombe picks up where he left off in Independence Day--taking road trips, describing houses and foreclosing at once on whomever he meets.
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Representative Fictions
William Deresiewicz : Literacy & Reading
An ambitious two-volume history of the novel explores its evolution across continents and centuries.
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Science Fiction
Richard Powers's The Echo Maker speaks volumes about neuroscience, nature and environmental degradation. But it says little about what it means to be alive.
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The Lives They Led
Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children is a superb comedy of manners, a richly tragicomic view of three thirtysomething Ivy Leaguers in the days leading up to 9/11.
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Londonistan Calling
Gautam Malkani's new novel explores the cross-section of youth culture, heritage and identity in London's polyglot, postcolonial neighborhoods.
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Writers From the Other Asia
Four new books explore Korea's cold war hangover and the indelible mark left by its North-South division.
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The Global Village
Nell Freudenberger : Globalization
What does it mean to be from a place? In Monica Ali's new novel, Alentejo Blue, the collision of locals, expatriates and tourists shatters any simple answers to the question.
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The Plot Against America
Jonathan Shainin : Arab-Americans
John Updike's Terrorist rips its plot from the headlines. But the book's Irish-Egyptian protagonist is paper-thin, and its jihad-lit plot remains stubbornly inanimate, devoid of passion or fury.
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Boxed In
In his new short story collection In Persuasion Nation, absurdist extraordinaire George Saunders offers a surreal depiction of the destruction of individuality through consumer mega-culture.
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The Zionist Imagination
As the founding father of the Zionist right, Vladimir Jabotinsky rejected Diaspora existence. Yet in his 1935 novel The Five he tenderly evoked it, offering a glimpse of something darker.
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Supersize Misha
Absurdistan is a stunning encore for novelist Gary Shteyngart, both the avatar of a new Jewish-American literature and an inveterate Eastern European trickster.
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Dead Souls
Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, written during the cultural renaissance that followed the Mexican Revolution, is a marvel of storytelling and testament to the power of the word.
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The Book of Daniels
Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island has at last landed on American shores, along with Pierre Mérot's Mammals.
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Love in the Ruins
Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française, published fifty-two years after she perished at Auschwitz, offers an unsparing critique of France under the German occupation and raises questions about the compromises she made.
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Dead Man
Philip Roth's Everyman is a contemporary morality play that explores the author's obsessions with health and virility, ecstasy and betrayal, and the certainty and solitude of death.
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Laughter in the Dark
New translations of novels by exiled authors Roberto Bolaño and Ismail Kadare explore the bloody crossroads where literature, politics and self-absorption converge.
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A Darker Shade of Noir
Robert Christgau : African-Americans
Walter Mosley's Fortunate Son is a serious novel about intimately connected yet diametrically opposed black and white stepbrothers.
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Exile and the Kingdom
In his newest novel The Last Friend, Tahar Ben Jelloun draws from his experiences as a writer and activist under Morocco's repressive monarchy.
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The Palestinian Patient
Gate of the Sun follows the odyssey of Palestinians driven to refugee camps in Lebanon by Israeli forces in 1948.
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The Facts
In Arthur & George, Julian Barnes mixes fact and fiction, linking Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with a wrongfully convicted Victorian author.
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The Master of Modernismo
Roberto González Echevarría : Poetry
Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, all but unknown in English-speaking countries, had a global impact on literature, ushering Spanish poetry into the modern era.
2005
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Out of Place
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, portraits of the Moroccan immigrants in Spain, gracefully evokes the unease of immigrants caught adrift between the stagnation of their old homes and the hope of their lives on a new shore.
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The Oceanic Feeling
John Banville's latest novel, The Sea, winner of the Man Booker Prize, is a painstaking narrative of memory, grief and many losses, remarkable for what it richly conveys about what it is to be alive, while continuously experiencing loss.
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Succès de Scandale
Lila Azam Zanganeh : Cultural Criticism & Analysis
American readers have long felt guilty about loving Lolita. As Vladimir Nabokov's nymphet heroine turns 50, Lila Azam Zanganeh traces the impact of a novel that has become both an icon and a cultural cliche.
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The Dying Animal
Michael Wood : Autobiography & Memoir
Gabriel García Márquez's new novella begins as an autobiography, but the passion-filled story of an old man, mad with love and clinging to life, weaves Marquez's other fiction into the tale.
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All About My Mother
The Caribbean island of Vieques is a fitting setting for Captain of the Sleepers, Cuban novelist Mayra Montero's engrossing story premised on violations of the dead.
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In Kars and Frankfurt
The winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature wrote this 2005 editorial in The Nation, addressing the issue of the artistic imagination at risk in a repressive state.
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Agee's Gospel
Two new volumes in the Library of America series present the life and work of James Agee, whose flashes of greatness as an essayist, screenwriter, novelist and Nation film reviewer have secured his place in the American literary canon.
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The Uncertainty Principle
By writing a novel about a conventional novelist writing about a conventional man, J.M. Coetzee's latest work illuminates the role of the novel and cuts through typical and tired theories on fiction.
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Another Country
Chronicling the final, devastating months of the Civil War, E.L. Doctorow's new novel, The March, reveals the author's complex love for an earlier version of America.
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Frontier Injustice
In Andrew Jackson: A Life and Times, the frontier president is cast as a one-man beacon for democracy. But Jackson's core belief was a fervent defense of land.
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Rearranging the Furniture
For prose scholar Viktor Shklovsky, who lived by the code of style and studied its depths, an unhappy love affair can be as much a personal tragedy as a plot device for more writing.
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A Hero for Our Time
Critics have been trumpeting Benjamin Kunkel as the voice of his generation. But his first novel, Indecision, about a 28-year-old empty vessel, is little more than an empty vessel itself.
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The Blank Verses
A Rick Moody novel is generally about one thing and that is Rick Moody's ability to write very long, occasionally graceful sentences.
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Rushdie's Receding Talent
It has almost become a sadness to review a novel by Salman Rushdie. Shalimar the Clown is no exception.
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Zadie Smith's Indecision
William Deresiewicz : Cultural Criticism & Analysis
It can't be easy to rein in a writer as successful as Zadie Smith. Her new novel, On Beauty, proves it's almost impossible.
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Love and Betrayal in Colonial Africa
Abdulrazak Gurnah's seventh book, Desertion, revisits the theme of exile and expands it to relationships---between lovers, between families, between countries.
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It's a Man's, Man's World
Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men seems designed as a calculated assault on the reader.
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The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene remains a compelling figure in this moment of moral bankruptcy.
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Reflections on the Body Politic
Novelist David Grossman discusses Israel and the role of politics in his writing.
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Invisible Republic
Siddhartha Deb's second novel follows an Indian journalist on an elusive search for meaning.
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Kindred Spirits
Michael Cunningham delivers a historical/noir/sci-fi novel haunted by 9/11 and Walt Whitman.
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Words Apart
Nell Freudenberger : Southeast Asia
In Amitav Ghosh's new novel, language is a medium of power.
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What Are They Reading?
Mark Hatch-Miller : What They're Reading
A review of The Ambassadors by Henry James.
2004
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The Good Girl
Russell Banks has established himself as one of America's most important living writers.
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Philosophical Convictions
Philosophers get attention only when they appear to be doing something sinister.
2003
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An Empire of Their Own
Melani McAlister : Radical Religious Right
The conservative obsession with biblical prophecy is increasingly shaping our secular reality.
2002
2000
1999
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This week: A look at the advocacy group MoveOn.org at 10. Plus: Controversy in Africa over the indictment of the Sudanese President; Amy Alexander and Chris Rabb on the challenges facing minority journalists in their transition to the web; and The Nation's new sex column. (13mb mp3)
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