Northwestern University Press, in a fine translation by Suzanne Jill Levine, has just released The Lizard’s Tale, an unfinished novel by José Donoso first published in 1997, eleven years after the author’s death. Donoso, a Boom writer and Chile’s most important novelist until Bolaño, wrote The Lizard’s Tale in 1973 while he was living in Calaceite, a village in northeastern Spain. Three years before, he published his best-known work, The Obscene Bird of Night, a dense, ambitious novel that clinched his reputation as a canonical Latin-American writer. There is evidence that Donoso considered including The Lizard’s Tale in his collection

In the world of the teenager, time doesn’t march forward, but oozes lazily. Wes, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of Jesse Browner’s fourth novel, may be rapidly gathering the faculties of a grown-up, but he’s still very much stuck in the mindset of an adolescent, in which an hour feels as long as a day. What better way, then, to depict the scale of the teenage mind than to set a novel over the course of twenty-four hours? “Everything happens today,” Wes declares about halfway through the day in question, a Saturday in New York City on the eve of the 2008

“I was under the tragic spell of the South, which either you’ve felt or you haven’t,” John Jeremiah Sullivan writes in “Mr. Lytle: An Essay,” from his new collection, Pulphead. “In my case,” he continues, “it was acute because, having grown up in Indiana with a Yankee father, a child exile from Kentucky roots of which I was overly proud, I’d long been aware of a faint nowhereness to my life.”

In Errol Morris’s new collection of essays on photography, he details the controversy over the New York Times’s misidentification of a torture victim in a notorious Abu Ghraib photograph. In the image, a hooded man draped in a poncho stands on a box, arms out, wires connected to his fingertips in an accidentally Christ-like pose. On March 11, 2006, the Times identified the man as Ali Shalal Qaissi—nicknamed “Clawman” because of his deformed left hand—and ran a photograph of Qaissi holding the by-then iconic photograph. Within a week, the paper printed a retraction explaining that Qaissi was not, in fact,

New York makes so much noise about itself, discusses itself so endlessly on its streets and in its bars, lends its name so freely to magazines and websites and newspapers, that the novelist foolhardy enough to engage with this nonstop tantrum of a place has little choice but to turn himself or herself into a noise-comprehender (The Fortress of Solitude, Netherland) or a noise-amplifier (Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, The Puttermesser Papers). I wasn’t aware that a third path exists until I read Teju Cole’s Open City—a novel that simply blots out the noise in favor of moments of eerie tranquility

Destiny, the 18-year-old protagonist of “Muscle Memory,” one of Katherine Karlin’s best stories, is determined to become a welder. With her family’s stability demolished by Hurricane Katrina, Destiny has taken the lowest paying job in the shipyard, overseeing equipment sign-out to help support herself and her mother. “You’re not going to learn anything stuck down here,” a co-worker warns her, a fact that Destiny is acutely aware of. If the workplace is where most of us size up our place in the world, Destiny is in search of something at once humble and utterly life-changing: a skill. Whether it’s the

How many secrets can one person have, especially a person who has made a living out of spilling them, ruthlessly mining his own experience for autobiographical monologues that brought him no small amount of fame and fortune? Not many, it would seem. But if you’re Spalding Gray, the writer and performer of self-revealing one-man performances such as Swimming to Cambodia and Gray’s Anatomy, you can have private secrets within performed secrets, unspoken confessions behind the public ones.

The crowd that filled the auditorium at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this month twinkled with eccentric glasses and necklaces. Most hair was gray or graying; viewing audience members’ heads from an auditorium perch was a little like gazing down at a cloud from an airplane window. Their color suited the occasion: we had gathered to celebrate the life of Dorothea Tanning, a surrealist poet and painter who turned 101 over the summer.

When Jeffrey Eugenides moved to New York, he was 28 years old and things were not looking good. After graduating from Brown in 1983, he and Rick Moody, a college friend, had driven out to San Francisco with no real plan other than making a go of it as writers, and lived together awhile on Haight Street, listening to the sound of the electric typewriter coming from the other room. Eugenides stayed in the city for five years and didn’t publish a thing. He calls these “the lost years” now. “My life just didn’t seem to go forward.” In 1988,

Translated by Robin Fulton