The setup is almost a cliché. Thirty years after the love of his life left him for a wealthy, more promising man, Erneste finally receives the letter he has waited for in quiet desperation. Although he can think of nothing else, he resists opening it for two days. When he eventually reads it, it devastates him. His former lover wants money. Before Erneste can get his bearings, another letter arrives, stripping “off a few more layers of scar tissue. Outwardly he was calm, but an explosion had taken place inside him.” It is in that gap that this sleek, understated

The star of Nina Revoyr’s third novel, The Age of Dreaming, is ostensibly Jun Nakayama, a silent-film-era Hollywood heartthrob. But the book’s real luminary is Los Angeles— old Hollywood in particular—a place where big dreams and big business rubbed shoulders, but with less treachery and friction than they do today.

In 1911, five members—father, mother, two sons, teenage daughter—of a family of six are murdered in their North Dakota home. Only a baby girl, whose crib is hidden from sight, survives the massacre. Four Indians selling handmade willow baskets stumble on the carnage; they are accused of the killings and, in a brutal instance of what their accusers dub “rough justice,” are hung within a day. The youngest is a boy of thirteen named Holy Tracks. It is these murders—by shotgun, by blade, and at the end of a rope—that form the fulcrum of Louise Erdrich’s powerful, if flawed, twelfth

Like the internal combustion engine and the Internet, the psychiatrist is one of those revolutionary inventions that no one embraces as an unalloyed gain for humanity. Psychiatry renders fatuous any attempt to imagine its absence from our world; even so, might not we be better off without it? Such a reflection is hardly the stuff of idle speculation for Charlie Weir, the therapist-protagonist of Patrick McGrath’s Trauma, who at one point voices the psychiatric “heresy” that “it is often by means of simple courage and a good woman that psychological problems are overcome, and without any help from people like

Love comes in for a thrashing in Joan Silber’s sixth book, The Size of the World, a collection of loosely connected stories. Women struggle under the curse of commitment: pining for an unrequited love, taking up with bad boys, compromising reluctantly, being paid for companionship. Most of the men are restless, emotionally dwarfed souls, skittish about settling down and forced by economic circumstance or post-traumatic lethargy to whittle down their notions of independence. When Silber does create a good guy, he gets jilted or dies.

Like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, whose nameless protagonist proclaims, “I yam what I yam,” and Amy Tan’s choreography of labored meals in pointed contrast to American fast food, Lara Vapnyar’s new story collection, Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, employs food—the buying, cooking, storing, eating, and ordering of it—to examine fractured identities.

Julie Hecht’s hilarious, neurotic narrator has been complaining about modern life since 1989, first in the pages of the New Yorker and then in two volumes of fiction, Do the Windows Open? (1997) and The Unprofessionals (2003). A photographer who splits her time between New York and Massachusetts, Hecht’s unnamed baby boomer spends the leisure-loving ’90s panicking over Long Island traffic, stuffy rooms, an optician she believes is a Nazi, the embroidered Ralph Lauren polo player, and people who eat meat. Though she faces some genuine sadness—reproductive problems and the loneliness of extreme anxiety—the narrator of these early tales is

Writers have long used a child’s perspective to relate fictional accounts of historical catastrophe, notably Günter Grass in The Tin Drum and Imre Kertész in Fatelessness. Bosnian-born German author Sasa Stanisic offers the latest installment in this tradition with his 2006 debut novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, a sensation in Germany, now skillfully translated by Anthea Bell. Through the eyes of the fourteen-year-old narrator, Aleksandar Krsmanovi, we witness a massacre perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs against their Muslim neighbors in the town of Vi¨egrad in 1992. The outlines of the plot are autobiographical: The protagonist’s escape to Germany from