There are a few constants in Jim Shepard’s fiction. The first is disaster: war, divorce, scientific catastrophes, murder, acts of God. The second is primary-source research. Shepard is the only short-story writer I have ever read whose collections come with bibliographies as a matter of course. Along with your hearty helping of human drama, a Shepard story serves up all sorts of facts: about handgun specs, the Cenozoic Era, how it feels to be John Entwistle (bassist for the Who) or serve in a Roman-legion detachment to the British frontier. In “The Track of the Assassins,” the legendary female

In a career that has never quite stood still, Paula Fox has been a journalist, a teacher, a model, a machinist, and, most notably, the author of novels, memoirs, and more than twenty children's books. Her profile has risen over the past fifteen years, with writers such as Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Lethem advocating on behalf of her novel Desperate Characters (1970). As she now approaches ninety, her latest book, News from the World, reprises her prolific career through the lens of her short work.

A collection of stories, essays, and autobiographical fragments published

Lynne Tillman’s characters inhabit language the way others live in rooms and cities. It’s not that they are made only of words—all literary characters are—or that they don’t have their own versions of material longings, needs, attachments, and obstructions. What’s different is that they are attuned to language. They fraternize with words even when they are not talking. They treasure clichés and ready-made phrases as if they were messages or hints, turning them over to find their wisdom, or at least the joke wrapped inside them. In her collection This Is Not It (2002), when a woman makes a

Out of the Past, Double Indemnity, Detour, D.O.A.—through titles and across content, classic noir semaphores repetition, impasse, entanglement, and terminus. The elegantly brutal, deadpan crime fictions of Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942–1995), created in the reverberation of the events of May 1968 in Paris, exploded those distress signals into static and silence. A socialist from Marseille who began drifting around dissident Communist and Trotskyite fringes, the translator of American hard-boiled novels and the author of Notes noires columns for French newspapers and journals, Manchette crafted

In an interview published in the winter 2010 issue of the Paris Review, Jonathan Franzen said to Stephen Burn, “I’ve never felt less self-consciously preoccupied with language than I did when I was writing Freedom. Over and over again, as I was producing chapters, I said to myself, ‘This feels nothing like the writing I did for twenty years—this just feels transparent.’” Franzen added that this struck him as “a good sign”—an indication that he was “pressing language more completely into the service of providing transparent access to the stories I was telling and to the characters in those

There’s a canny pageant of revelations on parade in Paula Bomer’s wry, butch, and persistently despairing debut collection, Baby & Other Stories. Not the kind of classic revelations that come at the end of most short stories, like the sun cracking open a rainy sky. Rather, these are more like broken umbrellas in a storm. The everyman misanthropes at the center of Bomer’s stories are subject to frequent, blunt epiphanies that uncover an axis of disappointment—with life, love, and procreation. Here is the dawning of truth: “In reality . . . the only real limit to one’s collection of behaviors