Reading The Three Weissmanns of Westport, the new novel by Cathleen Schine, is a curious experience. Even as you turn the pages, following the genteel misadventures of the titular clan—the aging mother, Betty Weissmann, and her two middle-aged, lovelorn daughters, Annie and Miranda—the book seems literally insubstantial, as though it is about to melt or turn to smoke in your hands. This is less on account of the writing, which is undemanding but intelligent, than of the reader’s realization that the book is only a temporary incarnation of itself. Before Schine wrote it, her novel’s story belonged

The economy and its discontents can be an anemic topic for literary fiction, and Adam Haslett struggles with this challenge in his debut novel about banking disaster, Union Atlantic. The disaster in question involves “rogue trading” in Japan that threatens to annihilate an entire Boston-based financial monolith, circa 2002. Doug Fanning, director of Union Atlantic’s “Department of Special Plans,” has been sidestepping legal regulations in order to exploit a hot insider tip regarding the Nikkei stock market. After his man in Hong Kong wrangles clients to invest, Fanning independently sends

The title story of T. Coraghessan Boyle’s new collection, Wild Child, is a fictional retelling of the life of Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, born to a peasant family in revolutionary France under an unhappy star. His early hindrances include muteness, a “lax” mind and an unsympathetic stepmother, who, when Victor is 5 years old, leads him to the forest and slits his throat. “Still, it was enough,” Boyle writes in one of this story’s wealth of haunting moments. “His blood drew steam from the leaves and he lay there in a shrunken, skeletal nest, night coming down and the woman already receding

A Common Pornography is neither common nor, by today’s standards, pornographic. It is more accurate to call Kevin Sampsell’s fragmented, moving memoir a Bildungsroman (albiet a true one). More precisely, for those keeping score at home with their glossary of literary terms, it is a nonfiction Künstlerroman, the story of an artist’s struggle from innocence to experience, in this case from small-town youth to fully fledged, urbane writer. One of the many interesting aspects of the story is that Sampsell never plays up or celebrates this transformation; rather, his story moves from one decisive

Jami Attenberg’s new novel, The Melting Season, begins with a familiar premise: a small-town girl leaves her problems (a broken marriage, a dysfunctional family, and a pregnant teenage sister) behind and sets out for Vegas with a suitcase full of cash. There she makes fast friends with another injured woman who becomes her metaphorical partner in crime à la Thelma and Louise, bolstering her with endless support and encouraging her on the road to recovery. In this sense, the book is a smooth, easy read with breezy dialogue and a seemingly recognizable story, smartly interrupted by the jolt that

In the summer of 1967, subscribers to the obscure far-left theoretical journal Socialisme ou Barbarie received notice that it was suspending publication and that its sponsoring organization, familiarly called SOUB, had dissolved. This cannot have come as too great a shock. Two years had passed since the last issue. But the shuttering of SOUB marked the end of an important collective project within the anti-Stalinist left, one whose influence was felt well beyond France.

SOUB had started life in the mid-1940s as “the Chalieu-Montal minority”—a small, beleaguered faction within the French