A decade ago, Columbia University professor Brian Greene joined the ranks of an unlikely set of literary figures—physicists working in arcane and hyperspecialized fields who managed to transmute the base metal of mathematical theorems and conjectures into best-seller gold. Stephen Hawking, once known primarily for showing that black holes emit radiation, had lit the path with his 1988 book A Brief History of Time. The next year, eminent mathematician Roger Penrose mused on quantum theory, computation, and consciousness in The Emperor’s New Mind. The success of these books was something of a surprise. Both Penrose and Hawking held positions high

Is the sheer bulk of a book worth celebration? Roy Kesey has never gone beyond novella-length before, but his novel, Pacazo, runs more than five hundred pages, bulging with detail and incident, with everything from midnight snacks to invasive insects. It’s a shaggy-dog tale, one that eventually—boldly—invites comparison to its great progenitor, Don Quixote. In cutting a classic wide swath, Pacazo exposes itself to risk, a tricky balance between hilarity and horror. By and large, though, this rangy novel earns its claim to the old knight’s inheritance.

In Spurious, Lars Iyer, a blogger and Maurice Blanchot scholar, explores the absurd and dysfunctional extremes of male bonding. Evoking literary duos like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and Othello and Iago, Iyer’s portrait of two insufferable academics fumbling for enlightenment illustrates what the author comically calls the most honorable cruelty: friendship.

Kate Briggs’s wonderful translation finally makes available in English a most unusual book by one of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century. The Preparation of the Novel comprises the notes of the third and last lecture course Roland Barthes delivered at the Collège de France, cut short in 1980 by his untimely death. Although the three lecture series were posthumously published in French in the order they were given, Columbia University Press have brought out the final course before the first one (How To Live Together, their translation of the second appeared in 2005) – an indication

Near midnight on a Friday in April 1854, Gustave Flaubert wrote one of his many letters to Louise Colet. Flaubert had spent days hidden away in his Croisset retreat, researching theories of clubfoot and discarding pages from the manuscript of “Madame Bovary,” and he told Colet that he had come to the conclusion that “the books from which entire literatures have flowed, like Homer, Rabelais, are encyclopedias of their time. They knew everything.” This conception — the novel that knows everything — would come to obsess Europe’s modernist writers, who dreamed that a narrative of infinite detail and esoteric knowledge

James Miller teaches “liberal studies” at New York’s New School, and his publishing history neatly embodies the interdisciplinary nature of his trade: He’s penned a social history of rock n’ roll (Flowers in the Dustbin), a study of Foucault (The Passion of Michel Foucault), and a history of social protest (Democracy Is in the Streets). Now, in Examined Lives, he explores questions related to what he deems “the problem of philosophy” in concise bios of 12 essential thinkers ranging from myth-shrouded ancients like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to the early moderns like Kant, Emerson, Rousseau, and Nietzsche.

The publication of debut novels by Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapnyar in the early years of this century heralded the arrival of a literary sub-genre: immigrant fiction specifically about people from the former Soviet Union. For nearly a decade now, a prolific handful of young writers have been describing the challenges of being Russian (or Ukrainian or Georgian or Latvian) newcomers to North America.

Though The Feminine Mystique is often cited as a founding text of second-wave feminism, reading it today reveals it to be a brilliant artifact—not a timeless classic. Betty Friedan’s lauded and notorious 1963 bestselling book skewers bygone stereotypes of femininity and homemaking with a provocative bluster that verges on camp. Its exaggerations, blind spots, and biases are a turn-off; its narrow scope is disappointing to those hoping for a comprehensive analysis of sexism or a broad agenda for social justice. But in its time, Friedan’s passionate account of “the problem with no name”—the malaise, emptiness, and frustration afflicting white middle-class