In Bass Cathedral, the fourth installment of Nathaniel Mackey’s epistolary novel From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the author plots language’s intimate relationship with music, the point where sound and sense meet. N., the series’s reedman and trumpeter, continues to chronicle the musical, intellectual, sexual, and supernatural exploits of the jazz group Djband (né the Molimo m’Atet, the Mystic Horn Society, and the East Bay Dread Ensemble, among others) in his letters to a correspondent known as the Angel of Dust. This volume finds the band in the wake of their first record

The unusually various characters in Nam Le’s excellent debut collection, The Boat, live between worlds. In “Cartagena,” for example, a teenage contract killer in Colombia moves from squalid shantytowns to his master’s opulent mansion; in “Hiroshima,”a young girl shifts unambiguously toward death in the days and hours before the atomic bomb is dropped; and in the title story, a Vietnamese refugee overtaken by a storm on the South China Sea feels as if she is “soaring through the air, the sky around [her] dark and inky and shifting.” As these brief descriptions indicate, the book’s seven stories

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.

The Age of Dreaming tracks the way LA and the movie world changed between the ’20s and the ’60s. Jun, who by 1964 is long retired and living in obscurity, receives a telephone call from a journalist and silent-film enthusiast, Nick Bellinger, who’d like to interview the aged actor.

We, Brave New World, 1984, A Clockwork Orange: These classics of dystopian fiction provide relief from their grim predictions only because they are predictions. The worlds the books portray are far in the future and thus, it is implied, preventable. Not so with Etgar Keret’s latest collection of disturbing yet hilarious short stories, The Girl on the Fridge. The dystopia that this Israeli writer presents is no imminent nightmare; it’s a reflection of the everyday irrationality and suffering in Keret’s homeland and elsewhere. And though this reflection is as fragmented as the world it

The sheer size of China’s population is the nation’s blessing and its curse. The hundreds of millions of workers who can produce goods cheaper and faster than anywhere else drive its rise as an economic superpower, but this astounding human density has taken a toll on the environment: The needs of 1.3 billion people have left little room for unspoiled wilderness. Then there is the psychological cost. Let’s just put it this way: If you’re one in a million in China, there are 1,299 others—and counting—just like you.

Those facts might help explain the amazing success of Jiang Rong’s debut novel,

In her splendid debut novel, Blood Kin, Ceridwen Dovey offers a tale about the revolutionary overthrow of a dictatorship in an unnamed country. The exchange of power she describes isn’t specific to the totalitarian governments of, say, Latin America or Africa, nor is it a critique of the sad play of current US international affairs. The novel isn’t, in fact, a commentary on our times, despite its setting in the present or the recent past. Instead, Dovey’s concern is more elemental: Blood Kin is a story about power, political and personal, and its dangerous ineffability.

The narration is

Yoko Ogawa has long been recognized as one of Japan’s best writers of the postwar generation. Yet this prolific author has never received a major English translation of her work, despite an oeuvre that includes more than twenty volumes of fiction and nonfiction. Stephen Snyder has finally undertaken this task, superbly rendering Ogawa’s spare yet intimate style for stories in the New Yorker, A Public Space, and Zoetrope. The Diving Pool, also translated by Snyder, is the American debut of three of her award-winning novellas.

The title novella tells the story of Aya, a teenager struggling with