The game of what is now called “real tennis” was arguably the first modern sport to be played on a standardized court rather than in the messy topography of the real world. It was the first sport to require special shoes, and its baroque rules, written down in the sixteenth century, were codified alongside those of empire. It is still played on a court that mimics the architectural idiosyncrasies of some now-lost courtly ur-space, with sloping roofs and a formal gallery. In interviews, Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue has described the establishment of the rules of tennis as a kind of

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.

It is unlikely that Aaliya Saleh, the narrator of Rabih Alameddine’s 2014 novel, An Unnecessary Woman, and Jacob, the protagonist of his latest, The Angel of History, would pass each other in the street, but if they did they would probably not speak. Aaliya is a misanthropic seventy-two-year-old recluse who, despite the violence raging outside her Beirut apartment during the decades, has devoted herself to the useless task of translating notable novels into Arabic. What makes her work useless (or “unnecessary”) is that these are secondary translations, based on prior renditions. Her version of Crime and Punishment, for example, is

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

Part of the suspense in reading Hari Kunzru’s astringent, transfixing White Tears comes in wondering when, or if, it’s going to stumble into becoming the very thing it’s trying to subvert: a sentimental paean to black musical authenticity that gets its back up about white folks’ egregious and (seemingly) endless appropriation of blues, jazz, rap, and other African American art forms. Such suspicions grow as it becomes clear that, once again, African Americans themselves are consigned in Kunzru’s narrative to bystander status, at best. But by the time the book’s horrific jolts have finished pulling your insides out of your

Woe to anyone picking up this slim collection who, steered wrong by its title, expects suburban-book-club fodder or ecstatic, dance-like-no-one’s-watching self-affirmation. Deb Olin Unferth’s sophomore volume of stories is more a cauldron of simmering desperation than a sisterhood of traveling pants. That title, Wait Till You See Me Dance, is a typical feint, a sly way to sneak the poison in. In these stories, people are constantly ending up in holes, both literal and figurative. They have lost things, or are lost themselves. They are looking for love in all the very wrong places: in prisons, for instance, and on

Certain appetites admit of no satiation. To satisfy them provisionally is only to hasten their resurgence: First comes the ache of expectation, then the diminishment of gratification, then the ache returns. So where does enjoyment fit in? It is at most a sliver, slotted between parallel lacks. In the ravenous fiction of the Lebanese-Brazilian author Raduan Nassar, the problem is not the absence of food but the impossibility of filling.

In a time of insurgency or civil war, the literary text has a way of seeking out shadow and unease to protect itself from political rhetoric or easy drama, as though avoiding gunfire or shrapnel. In Ireland, for example, in the period between the 1916 Easter Rebellion and the end of the civil war, W. B. Yeats wrote poems filled with inwardness, with self-questioning and ambiguous tones. The violence made him wonder (“Was it needless death after all?”). And made him unwilling to celebrate the heroism or the sacrifice (“Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the

Victor LaValle’s first book, Slapboxing with Jesus (1999), offered realistic depictions of working-class young people in the five boroughs, but by his second novel, The Ecstatic (2002), something stranger, if not outright weird, had begun to creep in. A little more weirdness came with each book: Big Machine follows a man who, having survived a death-obsessed cult, is recruited, at a bus station, to join what might be called a paranormal investigation squad. You could attribute some of the bizarre moments to the characters’ fraught mental states; perhaps, you might think, it’s all in their minds. But LaValle’s novella The