So I went to a party in Bushwick, Brooklyn, some weeks ago, the height of summer’s heat wave. Tao Lin was leaning against an air conditioner. I’d just been asked to review this book—his second novel, Richard Yates. I went over, told him I’d been asked, and offered him the opportunity to write the review himself, which I would submit under my own name. Bookforum would then publish the review, and a day or so later Lin would reveal the truth on his blog, etc.

Lin said he’d think about it, then contacted me the next day to decline. Which proves he’s cannier than I’d thought.

I told him that I’d

German-Austrian novelist Daniel Kehlmann’s Fame is a Nabokovian puzzle, a game of hide-and-seek, and a playful reflection on cultural renown and the lack thereof. Told in nine episodes that initially appear discrete but then rapidly connect with one another, the book focuses on three celebrities, three nobodies, and a minor author named Leo Richter, who early on speaks of a novel with a “narrative arc, but no main character.” Another character critiques Richter’s fiction, thinking it “full of complicated mirror effects and unpredictable shifts and swerves that were flourishes of empty virtuosity.”

Since its christening in the late 1980s by science-fiction writer K. W. Jeter, the steampunk subgenre has undergone few changes to its gaslight-romance-by-way-of-Wired formula. Along with Jeter, authors James Blaylock and Tim Powers translated the dystopian fables of William Gibson and Philip K. Dick into anachronistic fantasies, replete with images of jet-propelled dirigibles, pneumatic-tube ways, and the eponymous steam engine. Steampunk located itself in the Victorian fin de siècle, where London itself became a character, an industrial metropolis as imagined by H. G. Wells or Arthur Conan

The sixty-year interval between Henry Roth’s first novel, Call It Sleep (1934), and his second, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park (1994), constitutes the longest intermission in any significant American literary career. In the final decade of his life, Roth overcame severe depression and agonizing rheumatoid arthritis to produce a veritable Niagara of prose—about five thousand manuscript pages. Roth’s assistant, Felicia Steele, and editor, Robert Weil, sculpted three thousand of those into the tetralogy Mercy of a Rude Stream, which was published sequentially starting in 1994. Roth died in

As Gary Shteyngart’s third novel begins, Lenny Abramov is seated on a “UnitedContinentalDeltamerican” flight to New York after a year in Rome. Taking out a collection of Chekhov’s stories to pass the time, Lenny receives harsh stares from his fellow passengers. “Duder,” one tells him, “that thing smells like wet socks.” Perhaps America has changed during Lenny’s sojourn in the capital of the ancient world.

On landing, he discovers that his old college friend Noah Weinberg will be airing his welcome-home celebration live on GlobalTeens—a Facebookish social-networking site. “Before the publishing

The giant squid/sea monster is such a science-fiction and mythological cliché that the very title of British novelist China Miéville’s eighth novel, Kraken, embraces the genre as pulpy entertainment. Running a brisk five hundred pages, Kraken follows a frenetic stretch in the life of Billy Harrow, a curator at London’s Darwin Centre of the National History Museum. One day, Billy escorts a tour group to the main attraction—a preserved Architeuthis dux—only to discover that the giant squid is missing.

Thus begins a descent into a netherworld of quasi-religious cults, part-human creatures, spirits,

Andras Lévi and his brother, Tibor, have moved from the Hungarian countryside to Budapest and are ready to start their lives. Andras heads to Paris on an architecture scholarship; Tibor hopes to study medicine in Italy. But it’s 1937 and they’re Jewish. Their plans will be interrupted.

This is the opening of Julie Orringer’s debut novel, The Invisible Bridge, an account of Andras and his brother in the years before and during World War II. Before the war begins in earnest, Andras has a couple of years, and nearly three hundred pages, in Paris. He learns the language, gets a day job, impresses