Some contemporary commentators are arguing that democracy—hobbled by low voter turnout and new extremist parties—is currently in real trouble. But are today's representative governments in any more danger than they have been for the past century? In his latest, David Runciman lays out the history of democracy in crisis.

Chang-rae Lee’s new novel On Such a Full Sea takes its title from a line in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which the traitor, Brutus, refuses to believe that fate trumps free will: “On such a full sea are we now afloat / And we must take the current when it serves / Or lose our ventures.” Lee’s protagonist, named Fan, draws on a similar sense of purpose in the face of an outcome she seems all but destined to meet.

On Such a Full Sea is Lee’s fifth novel in twenty years, and his first to depart from the experience of isolation and alienation among immigrants. Here, the immigrants are portrayed

William S. Burroughs lived the kind of life few contemporary American novelists seek to emulate. A roll call of his sins: He was a queer and a junkie before being either was hip; he was a deadbeat father and an absent son; he was a misogynist, a gun lover, and a drunk; he was a guru of junk science and crank religion; he haunted the most sinister dregs of Mexico City, Tangier, Paris, London, and New York; he was an avant-garde writer with little affection for plot and none at all for epiphany; he wore his Americanness like a colostomy bag, shameful but essential. When he died at age 83 in 1997,

When the writer and painter John Berger won the Booker Prize in 1972—for his novel G., about sex, loneliness, a failed revolution, and the imminent devastation of the First World War—he rather famously donated half of his award money to the Black Panthers. On the political spectrum of his day, Berger’s action outraged the right and the left alike, the former for giving any cash at all to a band of militants, the latter for holding back the other half. A few months ago, the novelist and critic Geoff Dyer retold this story, off the cuff, at the start of a panel discussion in New York devoted to

A totemic novella of Modernism and alienation, Franz Kafka’s “bug piece” has been in publication for nearly a century, baffling and delighting readers in equal measure with its fundamental strangeness and rigorous avoidance of explanation. In our present era, marked by a ferment of genetic engineering and hybridization (not to mention isolation and economic hardship), revisiting this text seems not only appropriate but necessary. This welcome new edition of The Metamorphosis was translated by Susan Bernofsky in a smoother, less Germanic, more contemporary voice than the Muir version most

Some reasonable responses to sensing there’s a tiger in your house: calling the police, climbing out the window, realizing you’re probably imagining things and going back to sleep. Ruth Field, the elderly protagonist of Fiona McFarlane’s stunning debut novel, The Night Guest, does none of the above. Instead, she telephones her son in New Zealand (Ruth lives on a beach north of Sydney), gets out of bed, calls out in the night, and pictures the headlines that could soon convey news of her death: “Australian Woman Eaten by Tiger in Own House,” or, more salaciously, “Tiger Puts Pensioner on the