The recent publication of Nabokov’s index cards in The Original of Laura made me consider the fate of similar projects during the past few centuries. It’s striking how often we novelists are struck down in the middle of writing our weakest work—and yet these novels intrigue because, if only the writer had lived, the book might have really “come together.” As my days dwindle down, I contemplate writing chunks of say, four or five different novels: That’ll make them miss me when I’m gone! And yet what self-respecting writer doesn’t have those four or five novels already, in some drawer

The rubric “conceptual poetry” encompasses works written using a variety of techniques: sampling, appropriation, documentation, and constraint, among others. By far the most prominent—and controversial—is appropriation: A work such as Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day (2003), a word-for-word transcription of one day’s New York Times, extends Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made practice into the literary realm. In the 2004 essay “Being Boring,” Goldsmith writes, “You really don’t need to read my books to get the idea of what they’re like; you just need to know the general concept.” This coy sentiment, delivered in a deadpan voice, suggests an advantage to a conceptual-poetry syllabus: You

When we talk about books, we hardly every talk about how they help. It is unfashionable: Browsing the self-help section of a bookstore seems as shameful as picking up a porn magazine at 7-Eleven. Interviewers seldom ask authors, “How is your book meant to help people?” (Instead, they ask the impossible, “What does it mean?”) Yet authors write with the hope of helping readers and themselves—by untangling emotional, intellectual, and existential problems. Perhaps contemporary literary culture doesn’t talk about books’ utility as a way to justify their lofty status as precious, impractical objects. But we can have the best of

Stories of survival and cruelty are often set on an island, in books such as Robinson Crusoe and Lord of the Flies and on television shows like Lost. The titles below take the island as a narrative constraint: a limited setting that unleashes the authors’—and characters’—imaginations. The islands’ inhabitants perform multiple roles (as ghosts, metaphors, and figments of their isolated protagonists’ minds); the ambiguous element of fantasy is what makes these four books compelling reads. Spring Tides by Jacques Poulin In this odd book by Quebecois novelist Poulin, the protagonist, Teddy Bear, lives alone on an island in the St.

By marrying the intimacy of autobiography with the aesthetic eclecticism of the graphic novel, graphic memoirs occupy the fertile realm between fiction and nonfiction, as well as between literature and art. I first encountered this narrative chimera in the 1990s, when I read Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World, and the feminist zines I found along the windowsills of Boston’s indie bookstores. This underground aesthetic seemed to depict my own disaffected experience and burgeoning politics; since then, I’ve been glad to see long-form graphic storytelling find a larger audience. The following volumes are a small sampling of a rich genre. One Hundred

California is usually portrayed as a palm-treed Eden, wholesome and easeful, but as the Roman Polanski scandal has reminded us, this sunny vision has a lurid underside. Noir is one form this shadow world takes, but the books I’ve selected below aren’t noirish and share none of that genre’s sense of mystery. Rather, transgression here is casual, explainable, and inextricably linked to the everyday world. The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald Fitzgerald’s final, unfinished novel depicts ruthless and tormented producer Monroe Stahr (loosely based on 1920s–30s Hollywood wunderkind Irving Thalberg) and marks a rethinking of the Kunstlerroman. In this

The Beatles called it quits forty years ago, but books about them are still released at a pace as steady as Ringo’s drumming. No rock band, and few pop icons, have received so much literary attention. The Fab Four continue to inspire new memoirs, revised histories, and critical reassessments. Here are some titles to consider when you feel like getting back to where you once belonged. The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz Spitz set out to write the definitive Beatles history, and he succeeded—at least for now. Pushing one thousand pages (trimmed, according to Spitz, from a twenty-seven-hundred-page first