Alone Among the Ghosts
Marcela Valdes : Mexico
Roberto Bolaño's last novel, 2666, is his most profound exploration of art and infamy, craft and crime, the writer and the totalitarian state.
2008
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Unreal City
Benjamin Lytal
An appraisal of Rainer Maria Rilke's novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
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Back Talk: Kelly Link
Christine Smallwood
The novelist and publisher discusses zombies, teen romance and her reaction to being labeled a "New Weird" writer.
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Credenzas of Fragmentation
Natasha Wimmer
In António Lobo Antunes's new novel, a lost boy despairs of finding a real family in the wasteland of his past.
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Homing Patterns
William Deresiewicz : Books
Marilynne Robinson's new novel explores faith, loneliness and the national passion play of race.
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Meetings, Purchases, Pleasures
William Deresiewicz
Salman Rushdie probes the limits of the imagination to produce his most coherent and readable novel.
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Things Fall Apart
Fatema Ahmed
With two bodies of work recently reissued, now is a good time to wonder why novelist Patrick Hamilton is worth remembering.
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Tight Corners
Elaine Blair
When Richard Price moves from the urban ruins of New Jersey to the gentrified Lower East Side of Lush Life, things get complicated.
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In the Lost Realm of the Real
Carl Bromley
Michael Dibdin's detective Zen series sounds a melancholy note for an old Italy rife with political enemies.
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Searching for Traces
Ruth Scurr
There was little enthusiasm for revisiting the camps in Communist Hungary. Author Imre Kertész refracts that reluctance in fictional form.
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Dead Letters
William Deresiewicz
Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig saw himself as a Freud of fiction--a fellow spelunker in the caverns of the heart.
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The Age of the Wooden Spoon
Benjamin Lytal
The radical subjectivity and reckless politics of Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun find new expression in recent English translations and editions.
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The Counter-Family
Chris Lehmann
British author Jonathan Coe departs from grand social transformations and turns to the domestic sphere in The Rain Before It Falls.
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Man Out of Time
Mark Sorkin
In Hari Kunzru's captivating new novel My Revolutions, a former anti-Vietnam terrorist is dredged up after half a lifetime underground.
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Where Now? Let's Go!
Joanna Scott
The nonsensical funhouse of Donald Barthelme's fiction celebrates the cosmic joke of life and the pathos of grappling with it.
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Seems Like Old Times
Gary Phillips
This week's episode: Dieter Countryman reminisces about the good ol' days of selling the first Gulf War; Connie Waller gets his freak on in Vegas.
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Internal Combustion
Melissa Holbrook Pierson
Could Russell Banks be retooling himself as a fabulist?
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A Garden of Monsters
Carmen Boullosa : South America
The imaginary fascists in Roberto Bolaño's ironic encyclopedia Nazi Literature in the Americas bear a complex relationship to reality.
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Foes
William Deresiewicz : South Africa
J.M. Coetzee, now out with a new novel and a collection of essays, reminds us what a master he is at turning life into narrative.
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The Dot Matrix
Laila Lalami : Iraq
In I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody, novelist Sinan Antoon explores themes of love, loss, identity and resistance in the face of political oppression.
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Fly Papers
Lorna Scott Fox : France
An English translation of Lydie Salvayre's The Power of Flies demonstrates how this novelist and practicing psychiatrist has earned more nervous respect than love in France.
2007
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Car Talk
A mock-heroic travelogue by Julio Cortázar and his wife captures the contemplative life on the road.
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Memorable Gestures
Michael Ondaatje shows off his trademark narrative tricks in his new novel Divisadero, but the magic is wearing thin.
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Many Exits
Philip Roth's Exit Ghost considers whether we're astonished by death or the life that precedes it.
This week: Imagining a new new deal, with Howard Zinn, Frances Moore Lappe, Andrea Batista Schlesinger, Eric Schlosser and...FDR himself. Plus: Ennis Carter and Stephen Duncombe on the political propaganda legacy of the WPA. (13mb mp3)
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