In Tatyana Tolstaya’s earlier short-story collection, White Walls, a character remarks, “If a person is dead, that’s for a long time; if he’s stupid, that’s forever.”

This was marvelous, I thought, one of those wise, wise Russian sayings.

I mentioned this to a friend.

“Oh that’s all over the internet,” she said.

“Really?” That was disappointing.

She produced her device and paddled her finger across it like people do and said, “See? Here.”

“When you’re dead you don’t know that you’re dead, and it’s the same when you’re stupid,” the screen reported.

“But that’s entirely different,” I

I’ve heard it argued—and I agree—that fiction that builds a universe whose rules depart from our own allows for the contemplation of ethical dilemmas that cannot be addressed in or by the world as we know it. This kind of fiction—what my toddler might call “same but different”—tends to disrupt our go-to feelings. In an alternate universe, you are moved to relitigate the basics because you cannot take anything for granted. The sun is black; the moon is pink; everything we know needs to be reevaluated—the facts of our lives and, by extension, the principles we hold dear. Similarly, fiction that

The title of Neel Mukherjee’s latest novel recalls V. S. Naipaul’s Booker Prize–winning collection In a Free State, from 1971. Like Naipaul’s book, which consists of two stories and the titular novella, bookended by sections of documentary observation, Mukherjee’s is not a novel in the sense we might recognize, though it is being called one. It, too, is made up of five parts, more like long episodes than complete narratives. But the departure from the novel form is superficial. All of these episodes are set in India, and feature minor characters we glimpse in passing and then learn more about

“I’d been here three days already, and was tired of selling newspapers . . . and so yesterday I took the plunge.” This is Roberto, a Dominican migrant in Mexico, and he’s not speaking metaphorically. Roberto plunged into the Rio Grande (out of hope? boredom?). He even made it across. But he saw police lights at the US border, reports Óscar Martínez in The Beast (2013), his chronicle of Mexico’s migrant trail. So Roberto jumped back in the river. “I was too tired then and I almost drowned.” If his survival seems remarkable, his trip itself is not. Every year, per the Center for Border Studies

Faulkner had Yoknapatawpha County and Jesmyn Ward has Bois Sauvage—neither real, both true. Faulkner reimagined Lafayette County, in the northern half of Mississippi, while Ward has used Bois Sauvage in three novels to stand in for the small towns of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, which could include DeLisle, where Ward grew up. Ward’s 2008 debut, Where the Line Bleeds, is about twin brothers struggling to get by in Bois Sauvage. Salvage the Bones (2011) follows Esch, a pregnant teenager who loves Greek mythology, living in the days before Hurricane Katrina. (This won Ward the National Book Award