Historical fiction has always served as a partial exception to the widely accepted notion that a clear line divides literary fiction from its associates across the aisle in crime, science fiction and fantasy, romance, and so forth. Many of the canonically anointed authors of the European realist novel—Scott, Dickens, Hugo, Eliot, Tolstoy—embraced historical settings, and it is also the case, as Georg Lukács suggested, that realist fiction is written in and about history even when it depicts incidents that take place very close to the time of its composition: Balzac wrote historical novels of the present day. Marguerite Yourcenar, Mary

The last three of Marilynne Robinson’s four novels—the Pulitzer-winning Gilead, Home, and now Lila—apply a canonical sheen to a small Iowa town, a world of dying fathers, prodigal and miracle sons, fallen women, and homemade chicken and dumplings. In each book the same events—often the same conversations—are witnessed and recalled from various, luminously drawn perspectives, layering into a kind of applied sanctity the course of more or less ordinary life.

From an early age, Sean Phillips, the narrator of John Darnielle’s novel Wolf in White Van, has counted himself among a particular sect of “young men who need to escape.” Alone in his backyard in Southern California in the early ’80s, he pretended he was Conan the Barbarian; when he got a little older, he replied to small-print ads in the backs of magazines that said things like “Catalog of Rare and Unknown Swords from Around the World, Send Three Dollars and Two International Reply Coupons.” He spent countless hours—days, maybe weeks—scouring the sci-fi and fantasy sections of bookstores, seeking

When J. M. Coetzee’s novel The Childhood of Jesus appeared in the rest of the English-speaking world, in March, critics expressed a sense of polite befuddlement:

Nineteen years ago, at the age of twenty-six, Qiu Miaojin, a much-lauded Taiwanese novelist, killed herself. At the time of her death she was living in Paris—leading a lively and queer intellectual life very much like the narrator of this 161-page epistolary novel. The sensational quality (and here I mean the sensations one feels when encountering a book by an author who killed herself upon its completion) of its content in relation to its seeming parallels with Qiu Miaojin’s life is an inextricable part of the reading. The book is an entirely postmodern act. It is as if Goethe killed

Emily Gould bolted to local media fame seven years ago as a Gawker blogger. She wrote scathing posts about writers, celebrities, and anyone else who happened to come in for online scrutiny on a given day. She was funny. She was reckless. She was really good at being really mean. She was twentysomething and photogenic, and when she appeared on CNN, Jimmy Kimmel told her she had a decent chance of going to hell. I met her around this time at an event she was covering at the New York Public Library, and the first thing she said to me

When Anna Brundage, the heroine of Stacey D’Erasmo’s Wonderland, was three years old, her father sawed a train in half and pushed it over a cliff. It was 1972, and the art world was rocked: Critics declared that he had reinvented sculpture. A postcard of the gored, upended car became a dependable seller in the MoMA gift shop. But like any creative breakthrough, Roy Brundage’s sawed-in-half train is its own kind of curse; he will spend the rest of his life attempting to recapture the unassuming wildness of that piece. He tries, prolifically, muscularly: He breaks an abandoned Texas prison

Joshua Ferris’s fiction reverses the daily grind—characters wake up at the office and gradually wind their way home, to a place they wouldn’t have recognized at the beginning of the day. His novels are meditations on labor and alienation in contemporary America, stocked with characters for whom life is a disease at once mediated, ameliorated, and worsened by work. Ferris’s debut, Then We Came to the End (2007), about the decline of a loopy bunch of passive employees at an ad agency, is part of a continuum that emerged first in television shows and movies, starting with Mike Judge’s 1999

Georges Perec was the author of crossword puzzles, which might lead one to assume that his literary works likewise have solutions. But to say his most famous novel, La Disparition (A Void [1969]), written without the letter e, is solved by its premise is to dismiss its puzzling qualities as literature. His book of dreams, La Boutique Obscure, illuminates a conundrum at the heart of Perec’s project: Dreams, despite a plethora of clues, do not have solutions. They are all clue. Or as Perec writes, describing one of these dreams, “From far away, it looks like there is a nearly

There’s a special place in the annals of the epistolary novel for books whose epistles lie dormant in the dead-letter office, unanswered. In Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land, Lewis Miner’s updates sent to his high school’s alumni newsletter, complete with grandiloquent descriptions of his masturbation techniques, are deemed unpublishable by its editors; in Letters to Wendy’s, it’s unlikely that Joe Wenderoth’s unhinged and occasionally pornographic prose poems to the fast-food chain—written on “Tell Us What You Think” postcards provided at the restaurant—reach their destination; in Saul Bellow’s Herzog, the eponymous narrator writes his pained missives but never actually sends them. These

Of all the clichés that Hollywood movies have foisted upon their viewing public, one of the most robust is that the glamorous dream machine runs on the fuel of starlets’ blood and agents’ bile and writers’ flop sweat and all the filth that Kenneth Anger could scrape from the gutters of Sunset Boulevard and smear on the pages of his Hollywood Babylon. Anger made up his gossip when he wished, but Hollywood-inspired fiction has always had plenty of reporting on its side. James Ellroy based The Black Dahlia on a horrifying real crime. Actual adventures in the screenwriting trade illuminated