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The narrator and (barely) protagonist of Lynne Tillman’s smart and sleightful novel—her first since American Genius, A Comedy (2006)—is one Ezekiel H. Stark, a cultural anthropologist who specializes in vernacular photography. He’s a playful invention, given to citing highbrow or avant-garde culture—“We worked in silence. John Cage scored with it.”— and then undercutting himself with passé slang: “Kidding. Not.” In his earnest, academic, sometimes awkwardly demotic fashion, Zeke outlines his personal-professional interests in self and image, the inward oddness of family life, and wider cultural movements, chief among them second-wave feminism. He also sketches a sort of method. “I’m telling

In one sense, Keith Gessen’s A Terrible Country picks up where his first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, left off. That book’s last chapter is set in 2008, the year it was published, and narrated by one of the titular young men—needy, resentful, compulsively charming, and not always easily distinguishable Lost Boys who divide their time between anguished political musings, intellectual pissing contests, and the quest to disappoint as many attractive women as they can. After a few years spent mostly in Moscow, a city he notes is “what the world looked like before you covered it up

At some point after 1986, when he arrived in the United States, Amitava Kumar discovered what he later called an anxiety endemic to the “expatriate Indian.” He sensed that the longer he stayed in his new country, the more he risked “losing touch with the society he took as his subject.” He used that fear, in many darting, subtle essays and several books, to urge himself toward a style that was scrupulously faithful to what he saw and heard. “The mannered delivery of lines” in 1990s Hindi movies, the bodies of people poisoned by uranium in a small Jharkhand mining

Ling Ma’s debut novel, Severance, toggles between a novel about work, in which its protagonist carries out soul-sucking tasks to make more and more money (coerced by the structural requirements of capitalism), and a novel about a cult, in which its protagonist joins a group of zealots (coerced by the opportunity to live in a protective, if creepy, community). Both require a certain amount of women’s work (her superiors are always men) and water-cooler talk—the transition between the genres is smooth. The cult leader, Bob,is a “power-hungry IT specialist.” His arm is in a sling from “a botched carpal tunnel

I first heard the name Haruki Murakami as an undergraduate in Madison, Wisconsin, when a bandmate handed me a frayed paperback, saying it was “pretty rad Japanese cyberpunk.” The warring cells of Calcutecs and Semiotecs in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World did seem like they might have come out of early William Gibson, but the book wasn’t really science fiction at all. Sci-fi marvels are usually explained by some ingenious techno-MacGuffin; H. G. Wells’s Time Traveler, to take a canonical example, waves his hands at some glimmering quartz cylinders at the center of his machine to explain

What’s in a name? I ask, though with admittedly far less ardor than Shakespeare’s blushing young lover once asked her Romeo. Nowadays a woman knows that not every rose smells equally sweet—or is uniformly thorny, for that matter—and that the tragic answer to Juliet’s question in our relentlessly desperate times would most likely be: Depends on what you’re worth.

“The titles of certain books are like names of cities in which we used to live for a time,” Ortega y Gasset once wrote. “They at once bring back a climate, a peculiar smell of streets, a general type of people and a specific rhythm of life.” Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries is a book to live in: two volumes and more than 1,700 pages of roomy universe, robustly imagined and richly populated. Its streets are long, and its landmarks are varied. Sometimes the weather’s sultry, and sometimes the pipes clang in the cold. But Johnson’s rhythm is always patient, always mesmerizingly

Back when I was entering my forties and thus more youthful and idealistic than I am now (the forties having been the new twenties since the ’80s), I read Darius James’s Negrophobia in its original 1992 edition, and upon sustaining its full impact, I said to myself: “You know what, self? If something this graphically over the top, in your face, and on the mark doesn’t mortify white supremacy into oblivion, then nothing will.”