In 1995, an emigrant from Germany who had lived almost thirty years in England published The Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage, which uses a walk through East Anglia, on and near the coast, to gather reflections on time, destruction, connection, and culture. It appeared in English in 1998, without its subtitle; his next book, the essay collection A Place in the Country (1998), is only now appearing in English, about which more below; his next novel, Austerlitz, turned out to be the last book he would finish before his death in a car crash in December 2001. It takes

I’ve long admired Lynne Tillman’s criticism. Her writing is founded on curiosity and deep feeling. It’s precise and imaginative, devoid of jargon or cliché. It’s the opposite of what I dislike in criticism, and I know I’m not alone in my appreciation of what she does. “What she does” is hard to pinpoint, though, and the title of her new collection is a good-natured fake-out for all of us who might look to her as a model for how to live—or just how to write.

When a Paris Review interviewer asked Vladimir Nabokov what he liked to do best besides writing novels, the author replied, “Oh, hunting butterflies, of course, and studying them. The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru.”

Arianna Huffington is a person with quite a few moments. She relays one at the beginning of her fourteenth book, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder (Harmony, $26).

Reading the cumbersomely titled House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address is a lot like watching an episode of VH1’s The Fabulous Life Of… Should we feel envious? Disgusted? Or should we just let ourselves be hypnotized by its shmoozy, clubby charm?

People in the arts talk about talent all the time: who has it, who discovered the person who had it, its peaks and valleys, and when it has been “lost” or “wasted.” It’s all said as if we know what talent is, when we don’t. It is more than aptitude or being a quick study. It is more than skill, and closer to ease or sparkle in the skill’s application. It somehow forms a trinity with effort and inspiration, but without talent, those two can seem like sad and misguided cul-de-sacs.

After reading Eric Charles May’s Bedrock Faith, you may well feel like you’ve lived the whole of your life in Parkland, the South Side Chicago neighborhood where this promising but uneven debut novel is set, circa 1993. Parkland is a tight-knit, god-fearing community, one where nothing goes unnoticed and everyone’s lives are interconnected and in many cases have been for generations.

Jay Cantor doesn’t flinch at the lash of history. His “Stories for Franz Kafka” dwells on Hitler’s and Stalin’s Holocausts, both of which cast a shadow over Kafka and his work. The Prague fabulist was a Communist and a Jew, and though tuberculosis took him in 1924 (he was 42), many of those close to him wound up suffering torture and extermination. Cantor sifts the ashes to create these four fictions, to greatest success in the two closing tragedies: The penultimate “Lusk and Marianne” spares no detail of NKVD interrogation or a Gulag compound, and the closer spends most of