In literary annals, 2009 may well go down as the year that saw the publication of not this or that novel, set of poems, or “important” theory book, but, quirkily enough, the first of four promised volumes of the letters of Samuel Beckett. As Joseph O’Neill put it in the cover story for the New York Times Book Review of April 5, “an elating cultural moment is upon us.” That sentiment has been echoed by many other reviews: In the March 11 TLS, Gabriel Josipovici takes Beckett’s letters to be, along with those of Keats and Kafka, among “the ten or twenty greatest books of their time.”

Can a

Jean Rhys lived a hard-luck life and wrote, almost exclusively, about hard-luck women. Her pellucid writing, in which shards of pained observation cut a jagged edge in an otherwise fluid style, is so accessible that it is easy to overlook the art—the tight control—behind the seeming artlessness. Like those of Marguerite Duras and Katherine Mansfield, Rhys’s natural psychological habitat was despondency of a particularly female kind—what Mansfield in her notebooks describes as “an air of steady desperation,” hinging on desiring and desirability. With the exception of Rhys’s last novel, Wide

If artists can be divvied up into prodigies and late bloomers, the British writer Francis Wyndham has been both. His melancholy publishing history suggests this split career has been more a curse than a blessing. He composed his first stories between the ages of seventeen and twenty, during World War II, “while I was hanging about waiting to be called up and while I was convalescing after I had been invalided out of the army,” he once wrote. A collection was rejected by publishers—paper was in short supply, so it was difficult to get published, he told a recent interviewer. Still, his confidence

Ten years ago, Victor LaValle’s debut story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus, chronicled a group of kids growing up in New York, a modest crew that one narrator called the “future janitors and supermarket managers, plumber’s assistants and deliverymen of the United States.” They did the kinds of things kids in the city do: have rivalries and fallings-out, roam in packs from borough to borough, check out hookers on the West Side Highway, grow up, and move on. The stories were shot through with gritty humor, and—particularly in the case of the recurring character Anthony James, who would go on

Kate Christensen has been quietly carving a niche for herself as a chronicler of eccentric characters on the periphery of New York’s cultural vortex. Last year’s pen/Faulkner award for her fourth novel, The Great Man, raised her profile. The book’s conceit—two biographers competing for the attention of the mistress, the wife, and the sister, all satellites to a randy and recently deceased figurative painter—was knowing, the tone fang sharp. The women were over the age of seventy but not without allure (the former mistress hopes the first biographer notices that “her hips and waist were still