Ron Currie Jr. writes fiction that a Hollywood executive might call high-concept. His first book, God Is Dead (2007), imagines life on earth after God has taken human form—in Darfur, no less—and died. His second novel, Everything Matters!, tells the story of a young man called Junior, born in Maine in 1974, who is informed at birth by a voice in his head that the world will end roughly six months after his thirty-sixth birthday. Everything Matters! is largely free of sci-fi trappings and dwells frequently on familiar human dilemmas, but its “What if?”–style premise keeps the story moving. The

Hans Fallada is the romantic nom de plume invented by a man who lived through some of the most difficult episodes in his country’s history and came out indifferently, neither a hero nor a villain. “Hans” recalls the Grimms’ Lucky Hans, a fairy-tale fool who smiles even as he is cheated; and “Falada” is the talking horse in another Grimm tale who, though slaughtered by his mistress’s treacherous chambermaid, continues to speak truth to power as a taxidermied trophy. Fallada the man avoided the fate of Falada the horse. “I do not like grand gestures,” he said, “being slaughtered before

Sometimes, the soft literary citizens of liberal democracy long for prohibition. Coming up with anything to write about can be difficult when you are allowed to write about anything. A day in which the most arduous choice has been between “grande” and “tall” does not conduce to literary strenuousness. And what do we know about life? Our grand tour was only through the gently borderless continent of Google. Nothing constrains us. Perhaps we look enviously at those who have the misfortune to live in countries where literature is taken seriously enough to be censored, and writers venerated with imprisonment. What

Multigenerational novels about women often elicit analogies to tapestries—relationships are interwoven, themes are intertwined, and there is much braiding of narrative strands. Let us not likewise domesticate Kate Walbert’s remarkable novel A Short History of Women, which traces five generations back to Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a Cambridge-educated suffragette who commits suicide for her cause. Dorothy’s method, starvation, is agonizingly slow, and we are introduced to its brutal consequences in the opening chapter, narrated by her thirteen-year-old daughter, Evelyn. “I was afraid I would break Mum if I breathed, or spoke a word,” she says, and likens her mother’s emaciated body

Millions heard the sound of freedom in the Beatles’ music. Elijah Wald hears a death knell. In the songs of the Fab Four, he argues, pop music completed its decades-long transformation from a kingdom of democratic dance and authorless song to a lonesome land of private pleasures and isolated audiences. The result was segregation along lines of race as well as taste: In the late ’60s, as white rock sought introspection in albums and black pop chased good times on singles, an “increasing divide between rock and soul, listening music and dance music,” developed. Wald writes that the Beatles destroyed

Intertwining the stories of Aravind Adiga’s second book, Between the Assassinations, a self-described “novel in stories,” is the blandly anodyne voice of a travel guide writer introducing the visitor to Kittur, a city on the southwest Indian coast where the book is set. The cheerful pabulum of the travel guide’s spiel works as an ironic counterpoint to the boiling class resentment at the forefront of the stories. “After a lunch of prawn curry and rice at the Bunder, you may want to visit the Lighthouse Hill and its vicinity,” suggests our affable guide, but the person going to Lighthouse Hill

…it is difficult not to watch the movie on TV at the foot of his bed. 40” color screen, a jailhouse dolly psychodrama; truncheons and dirty shower scenes. I recognize one of the actresses … Here is the interior of “The Old Poet, Dying,” by August Kleinzahler. The vigil Kleinzahler keeps beside the dying man’s bed is a modern one, too infrequently expressed in poetry, perhaps. Anne Heche makes an appearance, though Kleinzahler declines to have her named (the movie he describes can only be 1994’s “Girls in Prison.”) This, like most of Kleinzahler’s asides, may not be an aside

Katherine Anne Porter came from “the soft blackland farming country” of north central Texas. The touch and the smell of that dark earth would stay with her for the rest of her long life. Born in 1890 in Indian Creek—then still a frontier settlement—she died, laden with honors, in 1980, in Silver Spring, Maryland. She lived on the move until well into old age; in a late interview, she calculated that she had resided at more than fifty addresses in her lifetime. She was restlessness incarnate. She married four times, once divorcing within a year, and had numerous love affairs,

The best one-volume encyclopedia in the world used to be the Columbia Encyclopedia, first published by Columbia University Press in 1935. In our house we have the fifth edition, from 1993, and we still get it out occasionally to look up kings and queens and old-fashioned stuff like that. It’s a lovely book, fat but portable and full of nuggety little entries on most things you can think of. It also has quite a poignant preface, in which the editors talk about the difficulties of updating an encyclopedia in such a fast-changing world: they note how much history, politics, even

The Bush administration sold us a war based on phony intelligence; Bernie Madoff sold investors invisible stocks. The art of peddling snake oil may be age-old, but something about the deceit of recent years makes Clancy Martin’s debut novel, How to Sell, feel very timely. Set amid the Fort Worth jewelry trade, this drug-fueled coming-of-age tale knowingly explores our culture of greed and excess.