On April 26, 1998, Monseñor Juan José Gerardi Conedera was beaten to death in his garage with a chunk of concrete, a few days after he announced the publication of a fourteen-hundred-page, four-volume report on the atrocities committed by the military during Guatemala’s endless civil war. The report detailed in painfully unambiguous terms the torture, rape, and genocide perpetrated against Guatemala’s indigenous Mayans, thought by the military to be sheltering guerilla warriors.

Senselessness, El Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya’s first novel to be translated into English, barely

Best known for his jaunty, ruminative nonfiction books on such redoubtable topics as bachelorhood, melancholy, and the male body, Phillip Lopate last produced a full-length work of fiction in 1987—The Rug Merchant. Whence, then, this tart, mischievous set of novellas—Two Marriages—paired some twenty-one years later into one deceptively trim, provocatively entertaining volume? Such is the mystery out of which fiction, like married life, is made—and into which Lopate lustily delves.

In the first and longer work, The Stoic’s Marriage, a well-off forty-eight-year-old Spanish Catholic first-generation

One could thumbnail The Pisstown Chaos, David Ohle’s third novel in thirty-odd years, as a dark-comic fantasia, and the author himself as a long-term toiler in the fields of postwar American experimentalism. And yet he remains elusive, far more obscure than he deserves to be, and the book, like the rest of Ohle’s small oeuvre, is a bit hard to account for. His first book, Motorman, from 1972, could be situated within the vein of Barthelme et al.; but what came after—well, what came after was silence. Decades passed, the debut accruing cult status all the while, until the appearance of the

In his first year as coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, Phil Jackson made headlines by passing important books out to his star players: Shaquille O’Neal described the author of Ecce Homo as “ahead of his time” and “digital” and began referring to himself as “the black, basketball-playing Nietzsche.” Kobe Bryant, who viewed Jackson’s gesture as a personal affront, judged the book he received—Paul Beatty’s first novel, The White Boy Shuffle (1996)to be “bogus.”

Well, yes. Insofar as The White Boy Shuffle is fiction, it might be described as such. And in Bryant’s defense, it’s the kind of novel

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

The protagonist of Harry, Revised, Mark Sarvas’s debut novel, is a Bel Air radiologist whose trappings (he drives a Jaguar and lives in a $2.8 million house) are in marked contrast to his bumbling, insecure nature. Paunchy and middle-aged, Harry Rent is a perennial avoider of confrontation—“he’s always found it easier to deny, to disavow, and to disengage”—which is the reason his eight-year marriage to the pretty, poised, and moneyed Anna Weldt has deteriorated into a state of benumbed complacency. When Anna dies during cosmetic surgery (she was having a her breasts augmented, in part to