In the title story of Antonya Nelson’s latest collection, Nothing Right, a divorced mother asks her teenage son—who’d once loved to be read to and now balks at writing a paper on Macbeth—why he dislikes literature. “It’s not real,” he says. “Just a bunch of imaginary crap.” Sure, you could give the kid an argument about Shakespeare, and so could the mother if she, like a lot of Nelson’s characters, weren’t worn down by parenthood. She recognizes, as he does not, that something like the story of “a weak king and his bitchy wife” has recently played out “in his own home.” But you also know what

Posthumous literary reputations are tricky affairs, as is the appellation “a writer’s writer.” It might be said that both serve a compensatory function, making up for a less than obliging reality by suggesting an artistic worthiness that doesn’t translate into popular appeal. Such is the case of Richard Yates, once neglected and now celebrated, who died from emphysema at the age of sixty-six on November 7, 1992, after years of smoking four packs a day, alcoholism, and general bipolar calamitousness (including one early suicide attempt and intermittent breakdowns).

Yates enjoyed brief visibility

Book of Clouds arrives coated in the sort of effusive blurbs conspicuous only when absent from a first novel’s jacket these days. It takes place in twenty-first-century Berlin, a city many have tried to capture with words, brushstrokes, and various shutter speeds, but one ignored by many of its residents in favor of their own misguided hopes and dreams. There the book follows Tatiana, the alter ego of the author, Chloe Aridjis, as she floats through life aimlessly, with a taste for ennui and slipshod metaphor. Very little happens to Tatiana/Chloe, whose defining characteristics are that she is

Long before Jerry Seinfeld and Samuel Beckett, there was Ivan Goncharov, a minor government official in czarist Russia, and his classic novel about an ordinary Russian aristocrat mired in his own extraordinary inertia. Originally published in 1859, Oblomov chronicles the misadventures of Ilya Ilich Oblomov, a protagonist who doesn’t leave his apartment, indeed scarcely shifts off his sofa, for the first 180-odd pages. Instead, like many Russian men of his era and station, Oblomov remains stolidly in place and worries ineffectually about the prospect of change—the planned uprooting of his Saint