Fiction

2009

• Evicted From His Own Head

  Elaine Blair : Russia

  In the stories of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, the landscape of the Russian revolution is hostile territory, and terrifying in its scope.

• Linguistic Currency

  Ange Mlinko : Lingo

  In an information economy, tiny asymmetries in language comprehension translate into vast profits--and large-scale collapses.

• At Least, At Most

  Charles Taylor

  With his plain, weather-beaten prose, Don Carpenter was a good enough novelist not to have to prove it.

• 

  Honey and Salt

  William Deresiewicz

  Technology has made us capable of exterminating ourselves. In The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood wonders what might save us.

• Drunk and Disorderly

  Phoebe Connelly : The Short of It

  Jean Rhys wrote about women who tangled with class and sexuality on their own terms.

• Nader's Road to Utopia

  Richard Lingeman : Ralph Nader

  In Ralph Nader's new utopian novel, "only the super-rich can save us."

• 

  Back Talk: E.L. Doctorow

  Christine Smallwood

  A conversation with the author of Homer and Langley about opting out.

• 

  A Domestic Existentialist

  Natasha Wimmer

  Mercè Rodoreda's fiction plumbs a sadness borne of helplessness, an almost voluptuous vulnerability.

• Speak as Little as Possible

  Rachel Aviv

  Novelist Clarice Lispector idealized animals and idiots because they were free of the desire to translate experience into words.

• 

  Aracataca and Sucre

  William Deresiewicz

  Will narrowed on a single object and fixed in the face of adversity--such is the recurring story of Gabriel García Márquez's work and life.

• 

  In the Theater of Isak Dinesen

  Joanna Scott

  A reconsideration of the fictive truths behind a storyteller's many masks.

• 

  Iron Hans

  Benjamin Lytal : Germany

  Novelist Hans Fallada resented the constraints of the Nazi era but did not desist in his craft.

• 

  Seed Projects

  Marcela Valdes : Chile

  Does Alejandro Zambra's Bonsai mark the end of an era in Chilean literature?

• Chop Shops

  Charles Taylor : The Short of It

  Over a decade ago, in his novel The Ax, Donald E. Westlake captured the ruthlessness and anomie of economic Darwinism.

• Toad Skin?

  Lorna Scott Fox

  News From the Empire hacks out a sinuous, branching path that connects fantasy with fact and allegory with analysis.

• Puttin' on the Glitz

  Natasha Wimmer

  Set in the glossiest of sanctuaries, Rex is a complicated and dazzling indictment of contemporary fiction.

• 

  The Kundera Conundrum

  Jana Prikryl

  How did Milan Kundera's antipathy toward the media become as curdled as the Czechs' allergy to his success?