For some time I’ve wondered how Michel Houellebecq’s Submission would play when it arrived here in the States, nearly a year removed from its tumultuous publication in France. In that country, of course, it appeared the same morning that terrorists slaughtered much of the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo, including one of Houellebecq’s closest friends. The book had already enjoyed—if that is the right word, and with Houellebecq it probably is—a prepublication patina of infamy. The novel dominated the evening-TV pundit fests, sparking debates about multiculturalism, Islamophobia, and the politics of provocation and responsibility. Fleur Pellerin, the embattled minister of

The plot of Clancy Martin’s new novel, Bad Sex, is rickety; it makes the narrative sway. Brett, a writer, is married to Paul, a hotelier with kids. The couple live in Mexico City. When a storm hits Cancún, Brett goes to check on a property there. By chance, her husband’s banker, Eduard, is also in town; by luck, he looks like Benicio Del Toro, if only because Benicio Del Toro is the one hot and famous Latino of whom Martin—or Martin’s reader—has heard. Some months later, Paul discovers her and Eduard’s affair by way of, what else, her phone bills,

Sarah Schulman was already working on her third novel when, in the late 1980s, customers at Leroy’s coffee shop in Tribeca, where she was waitressing, told her she needed to get an MFA. She joined Grace Paley’s CCNY class and, as she later wrote, read “a scene from my novel-in-progress After Delores, in which the lesbian narrator meets a little go-go dancer named Punkette, who takes her back to her tenement apartment and tells her about the woman she loves.” The other students didn’t get it: They assumed that the narrator was a man. Paley gave Schulman a sharp look

Mark Leyner is exhausting. Although often mentioned in the same breath as David Foster Wallace, with whom he appeared, along with Jonathan Franzen, on a classic 1996 episode of Charlie Rose, it is impossible to envision a Leynerian corollary to Infinite Jest that would be anything short of psychosis-inducing. Leyner’s books—recursive, often maddening, laden with an encyclopedic range of references, from the art-historical to the biochemical—are slim things, intended to accomplish niche seek-and-destroy missions before abruptly retiring.

Rebecca Schiff’s debut story collection, The Bed Moved, is a shorter-than-average book of shorter-than-average fictions about misanthropes who are (or may as well be) near-miss versions of each other, all of whom find the same pained comedy in sex, death, Brooklyn, Judaism, and summer camp. The title story, two pages long and the first piece in the book, opens with an unnamed narrator reporting that “There were film majors in my bed—they talked about film. There were poets, coxswains, guys trying to grow beards.” Two or three other stories open with similar lists, and one called “Third Person” features a

Nicotine is further proof that Nell Zink has one of the finer imaginations in fiction today. Also a tin ear: “He steps out into the angled light of early fall, which is creating colorful geometric patterns on the fawn-colored carpet via prismatic glass in the Glasgow-style transoms of the French doors facing west.” I don’t read Zink for these stilted autodidactic flourishes—for that I prefer John Kennedy Toole, with whom she shares a trademark comical pathos.

Funny ideas people have, about the way Irish writers think. When Eimear McBride’s first novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, was published in 2013—she’d finished it a decade before—it was rightly celebrated for its exacting style and unwincing narrative of child sexual abuse. The book won prizes in Britain, where it first appeared; but its ambitions were easily misread by critics whom the prose flummoxed. Here is a sample: “Two me. Four you five or so. I falling. Reel table leg to stool. Grub face into her cushions. Squeal. Baby full of snot and tears.” Some reviewers, gulled I

Early in his remarkable How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), Mohsin Hamid advanced an idea familiar to readers of nineteenth-century fiction: Novels should teach readers how to dress, address a member of the opposite sex, and elevate one’s standing in society. In other words, the novel could function not only as entertainment but also as self-help. Things haven’t changed too much. We still read to improve ourselves. But there’s one significant difference: Where the imagined reader of earlier times might have read books in order to learn how to behave in a civilized way, we now read