One on One: Talking with Dame Muriel Spark

Editor's Choice: three of this season's sleepers

The Story: James Marcus on recent short-story collections

Lynne Tillman on Underworld, by Don DeLillo

Wayne Koestenbaum on Hand to Mouth, by Paul Auster

Paul West on The World is the Home of Love and Death, by Harold Brodkey

Kate Bernheimer on the new tale: The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, by A.S. Byatt; Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday, edited by Italo Calvino; Vincent's Tale: A Bedtime Story for Boyfriends, by Nolan A. Dennett; A Blessing on the Moon, by Joseph Skibell; The Embroidered Shoes, by Can Xue

Joy Katz on New York Mosaic: Three Novels by Isabel Bolton

Lisa Cohen on The Word "Desire," by Rikki Ducornet

Caryl Phillips on The Far Euphrates, by Aryeh Lev Stollman

Bruce Hainley on My Brother, by Jamaica Kincaid

Martha Baer on The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami

Beth Nugent on The Skull of Charlotte Corday, by Leslie Dick

Dale Peck on The Witch of Exmoor, by Margaret Drabble; and Already Dead, by Denis Johnson

Hilton Als on Burning the Days: Recollection, by James Salter

Carol Anshaw on An Advent Calendar, by Shena Mackay

Serge Guilbaut on Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, by Caroline A. Jones

Lisa Liebmann on Paper Museum: Writing About Painting, Mostly, by Andrew Graham-Dixon; and Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop: The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst, by Matthew Collings

David Frankel on I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, by Damien Hirst

Robert Shiff on About Modern Art: Critical Essays 1948–1997, by David Sylvester

Richard Shone on With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer, by Susannah Clapp

Donald Kuspit on Confessions of an Art Addict, by Peggy Guggenheim

Carol Armstrong on On Abstract Art, by Briony Fer

Arthur C. Danto on Invisible Colors: A Visual History of Titles, by John C. Welchman

Greil Marcus on Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy, by Dave Hickey

Svetlana Boym on Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art, by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, edited by JoAnn Wypijewski

M.G. Lord on Laughing in the Dark: A Decade of Subversive Comedy, by Laurie Stone

Erica Rand on An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists, and the Body, by Rosemary Betterton; and Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture, by Mira Schor

Molly Nesbit on Imagining Desire, by Mary Kelly

Marvin Heiferman on The End of Innocence: Photographs from the Decades that Defined Pop: The 1950s to 1970s, edited by Liz Jobey; Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising Photography, by Patricia Johnston; Seydou's Keïta, edited by André Magnin; On This Site: Landscape in Memoriam, by Joel Sternfeld

Daniel Birnbaum on Concrete Jungle, edited by Mark Dion and Alexis Rockman