I first met Dodie Bellamy in a graduate nonfiction workshop at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco; she was my teacher. I remember her as encouraging and honest. Her most recent book, The TV Sutras, is a personal meditation on religious experience, as well as what it means to be a teacher and to be taught. Like Bellamy, I’ve experienced a cult of sorts, in that I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian family. Perhaps that is why I’m especially drawn to her work. Few ex-cult members can ever entirely turn their backs on the teachings

Eula Biss opens her new book, On Immunity: An Inoculation, with a description of a video her husband recorded the day before she gave birth to their son. In the video, she observes, her face looked free of fear. Twenty-four hours later, after a difficult labor and a blood transfusion, this was no longer true. Suddenly she feared many things: lead paint in the walls, toxic plastics in the crib mattress, carcinogenic minerals in the water. It was 2009, the H1N1 vaccination campaign was soon to launch, and a post-recession wariness tinged the air—“not a good season for trust,”

I met Yelena Akhtiorskaya in the Columbia MFA program, and soon after edited her first published stories, at n+1 magazine. These were portraits of Russian immigrants who failed to fully embrace their new country; they often dreamed about returning, or at least about taking a vacation. Akhtiorskaya’s layered first novel, Panic in a Suitcase, out last month from Riverhead, is also about ambivalent newcomers to the United States. The Nasmerstov family tries to persuade its most outsized member, the poet Pasha, to finally relocate from Odessa, as its youngest member, Frida, considers flying the coop to Ukraine. Most extraordinary

William T. Vollmann In 1994, as William Vollmann traveled by car from Split to Sarajevo with two fellow reporters—one of them a friend he’d known since high school—an explosion or possibly a sniper killed his two companions. Later, while reporting on the Siege of Sarajevo, Vollmann was offered journalistic access to an important Bosnian military leader if he was willing to murder a prisoner of war as a show of loyalty—an opportunity he turned down. Fictional treatments of these real-life horrors open Vollmann’s Last Stories and Other Stories, a collection that veers from realistic to supernatural representations of death,

For her new book, The Shelf, Phyllis Rose read an entire shelf of fiction at the New York Society Library (NYSL), by authors whose names begin with LEQ to LES. The enterprise, which Rose refers to as “adventures in extreme reading,” led her to read authors good and bad, well-known and forgotten. The boundaries of the project, in fact, led Rose to unpredictable places: “I would read my way into the unknown—into the pathless wastes, into thin air, with no reviews, no bestseller lists, no college curricula, no National Book Awards or Pulitzer Prizes, no ads, no publicity, not

Capitalism: A Ghost Story (Haymarket), Arundhati Roy’s latest book, describes in impassioned detail the consequences of India’s economic and political choices over the past few decades, from which a few Indians have benefited and many, many more suffered. In late March, Roy read from the work to a sold-out hall at the New School. Afterward, she spoke to Siddhartha Deb about India’s wealth divide, the expectations of the country’s “brash new middle class,” the impending elections, and the Naxalite protests in the forest. Roy became famous for her much-admired 1997 novel, The God of Small Things. The nonfiction that she

“I’m mortified to be on stage,” Bob Dylan said in a 1977 interview, “But then again, it’s the only place where I’m happy. It’s the only place you can be who you want to be.” It’s from this conceit—of Dylan’s infamous reticence and the many personas he’s adopted over the years—that David Kinney founds his fascinating inquiry into the world of obsessive Bob Dylan scholars, The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob, which comes out in May. Kinney, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, is no stranger to infiltrating obscure subcultures, as he did in The Big One: An Island,

Rabih Alameddine’s latest novel, An Unnecessary Woman, is about Aaliya Sohbi, a 72-year-old recluse and translator. The novel begins with Aaliya accidently dying her hair blue, and covers what seems to be just a few days of her life. Her thoughts are saturated with literature, and often turn to her semi-senile mother, her troubled best friend, Hannah, and the landscape of the ever-changing Beirut. An intricate portrait of a singular character, An Unnecessary Woman brings you right to into the depths of the mind of an introvert, questioning the value of living for literature alone. Alameddine, who was born

Yan Lianke Yan Lianke occupies a contradictory place in the landscape of contemporary Chinese literature: He is one of the country’s foremost novelists—winner of both the Lu Xun and Lao She prizes—but four of his books have been banned and can only be read in foreign editions. Once a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army (where he had a job writing propaganda), he lost his commission in 2004 after the publication of the Chinese edition of Lenin’s Kisses and was, for a period, barred from leaving the country. But the political winds have shifted yet again, and he now

Daniel Alarcón At Night We Walk in Circles, Daniel Alarcón’s new novel, is set in an unidentified South American country of great contrasts, turmoil, and beauty. The plot revolves around Nelson, a young actor who is selected to go on an improbable tour to the provinces for an anniversary revival of “The Idiot President,” a absurdist play written by Henry Nuñez, one of the leaders of the long-defunct insurgent theater group Diciembre. In an intricate narrative that is part love story, part travel log, and part thriller, the characters of At Night We Walk in Circles are gradually consumed

Hilton Als It’s been 15 years since the publication of Hilton Als’s previous essay collection, The Women. Now, in the florid White Girls, the New Yorker writer expounds on topics as varied as Truman Capote, Louise Brooks, Gone With the Wind, and Eminem. Effortlessly controversial, Als manages to add new layers to familiar subjects (the “n-word,” Richard Pryor, Flannery O’Connor) and fearlessly challenges conventions of race, culture, and sexuality. Bookforum recently called the author to ask him about White Girls. BOOKFORUM: You call a lot of people “white girls” in your new book, including Louise Brooks and Flannery O’Connor,