The afterword to Olga Grushin’s second novel, The Line, explains that her book is based on Igor Stravinsky’s 1962 visit to Russia, the great composer’s return home after fifty years abroad. More than five thousand fans waited a year in line for a concert he would conduct, establishing schemes to preserve their places and forming “a unique and complex social system.” While the historical circumstances were singular, this makeshift community was not. Elaborate queues were an important part of the Soviet system: People waited in rows for everything—food, clothing, medicine, travel permits—and the

Scott Bradfield writes about America like the part-time expat he is. Living half in London, half in the United States, Bradfield keeps a wary distance from his homeland, employing his outcast narrators to do his dirty work: sneaking into suburban neighborhoods and peering into bedroom windows just to reaffirm that a home is nothing but nails and wood. It makes for a creepy reading experience.

His first novel, The History of Luminous Motion (1989), chronicled life on the road as observed through the untamed imagination of an adolescent boy, wandering with his mother through a series of collapsing

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić is on the simplest level about the adventures of four old hags, plus their families and friends, adventures seen through the palimpsest narration of ur-witch Baba Yaga—the greatest hag of ’em all. I don’t use the word hag impudently here. The author not only invites the term; in this strange and wonderful book, she owns it.

Divided into three parts, the book begins with a mundane tale about a difficult mother-daughter relationship and gradually hints at something eerie hidden in the folds of its plain skirt. The story is located in Zagreb, which, we

The most gifted essayists are often just brilliant storytellers. Such is the case with Elif Batuman in her debut collection, The Possessed. A teacher at Stanford University, she has published some of this work in the New Yorker, n+1, and Harper’s. Rather boldly for a tyro essayist, Batuman employs a first-person style, enriched with dialogue, characters, superb pacing, and sizzling rhetoric. It’s easy to imagine what a sharp and engaging lecturer she is—if, as her introduction has it, she has indeed “stopped believing that ‘theory’ had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was

In "Fame," one of the prose poems from A River Dies of Thirst, the last collection he published before his death in 2008, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish noted sardonically that "fame is the humiliation of a person deprived of secrets." Darwish knew fame well; he had been acclaimed from the moment his poems first appeared, in 1960, when he was only nineteen. For the rest of his life, he would be celebrated as "the Palestinian national poet" and "the voice of his people." One of the ironies, if not the humiliations, of such a role is that the poet whose words promise liberation may find

A subtle misanthropy pervades Justin Taylor’s debut story collection, Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever. Taylor’s heroes—mostly males ranging from twitchy kids to restless thirty-somethings—are reliably uncomfortable in their own skins, embracing risk in an attempt to salvage some sense of themselves. The nameless narrator of “Jewels Flashing in the Night of Time” works in a small-town sandwich shop and offers an unnerving soliloquy about deli meat: Ham is “pink as a boiled baby and is 11 percent water and comes wrapped in this plastic with a red criss-cross design on it and when you slice