An air of comical amphetamine dependence pervades Martin Millar’s debut novel, Milk, Sulphate, and Alby Starvation. The protagonist, Alby, is a twenty-six-year-old paranoiac and small-time sulphate (i.e., speed) dealer convinced that both Chinese gangsters and the Milk Marketing Board have contracts out on his life. The book’s plot is chopped into raucous little sections that seem to reflect the characters’ short attention spans, while its sentences, in their haste to catalog the chaos, often forgo punctuation entirely. Indeed, one comes to feel thoroughly under the influence of Millar’s lively,

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 the tyrant's

It is significant that Helen Carr opens her account of the Imagist movement with a personal detail: the moment in 1912 in the British Museum tea-room, when Ezra Pound read his one-time fiancée, Hilda Doolittle's completed poem, "Hermes of the ways", and, on the strength of it, pronounced her, "HD Imagiste". Whether or not this really marks the beginning of the Imagist movement, literary history hasn't been too concerned to investigate – the romance and drama of it have been enough.

But this moment is significant for Carr's magnum opus (and at almost 900 pages, her study is just that), as it