T. C. Boyle is getting in touch with his feminine side. His last novel, Talk Talk (2006), was his first to feature a woman in a leading role. The Women, which clearly announces his intention to again focus on the fairer sex, is a lushly complex saga of the wives and lovers who trailed, like geese flying in formation, behind Frank Lloyd Wright.

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 Mexican (the

Sens-Plastique is a book beyond classification, and the same might be said of its author. Malcolm de Chazal was born on Mauritius in 1902 to an old and prosperous colonial family resident there since the eighteenth century. A surprising number of Rosicrucians and Swedenborgians dot his lineage, and one might detect some echoes of their beliefs in his own eccentric thought. Except for a few years studying engineering in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he spent his life on the island, working first in the sugar industry and then as a civil servant. Chazal’s first writings concerned political economy, but then he

Will Heller is a sixteen-year-old paranoid schizophrenic experiencing a mental break. During the course of a day, Will, nicknamed Lowboy, moves through the underground sprawl of Manhattan’s subways, occasionally surfacing. As he likewise dips into and out of psychosis, he reasons, through the screaming overload of his thoughts, that losing his virginity will “cool the world,” saving it from the destruction of climate change, for “the world’s inside of me . . . just like I am inside the world.” Through the logic of his crushing illness, Will is trying to save himself.

Recently on NPR, Philip Seymour Hoffman gave an interview that was surprising in its awkward, fumbling banality. For example, on the difference between theater and film actors, he offered, “I’m sitting here and [theater actors are] doing it in front of me, but the only difference is that they’re doing it and I’m watching, but ultimately we’re all people hanging out in the same building.” Yet the taut intelligence of Hoffman’s performances can scarcely be gainsaid; like the work of many post-Strasberg stars, his oeuvre is a testament to an instinctive, emotional intelligence, which is not, perhaps, so easily put

The Wilderness is Samantha Harvey’s first novel, but it feels like a mature work, as well crafted and as cryptic—“familiar and strange in one breath”—as an ancient boat found preserved in the peat of the northern-England moors where the book is mostly set. The boat, like many other objects in this elaborately allusive text, is a metaphor for the problems of memory that dog the main character, Jake, an architect and the grandson of Holocaust victims, throughout his life.

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 Petersburg household, distressing notices of declining fortune from his

Hole, the opening story in Andrew Porters debut collection, The Theory of Light and Matter, draws a blueprint for the nine that follow: A young man looks back on his suburban childhood, recalling the strange hole in his neighbors driveway and the day, a decade before, his friend climbed into it and died. The books other narrators struggle with the metaphoric gaps that manifest themselves in otherwise ordinary lives. “As he entered me for the first time, a woman says about her soon-to-be fiancé, it seemed that I had just opened up a hole in my life. A fathers decision

The Israeli novelist Aharon Appelfeld can muster no patience for those critics who insist on dubbing him a Holocaust writer. In his harrowing memoir, The Story of a Life (2004), he admits “there is nothing more annoying” than that characterization for a Jewish novelist who survived the camps. J. M. Coetzee has this to say: