Vivant Denon translated from the French by Lydia Davis New York Review Books ($12.95) by Laird Hunt The night was superb; it revealed things in glimpses, and seemed only to veil them so as to give free rein to the imagination. This little book of lovely and loving deceptions has had a colorful history. First […]

Tahar Ben Jelloun Penguin Books ($15) by Steve Street The Moroccan worlds Tahar Ben Jelloun creates in this compelling novel—one in the title city and another in the lives and minds of a variety of Moroccan emigrants to Spain—are so well drawn that when an overt analogy to Mexican-US immigration appears, it’s startling. That situation […]

by Scott F. Parker Because of the degree to which David Foster Wallace articulated his own project in his interviews and nonfiction (and in his metafiction)—and because of the strength of that articulation—the standard most readers judge him by is his own. The most prominent example of this is in the judgment of how his […]

by Kevin Smokler Often called “a citizen writer” like her friend and mentor Wallace Stegner, Terry Tempest Williams is one of the foremost explorers of the American landscape. Raised and still residing in Utah, she has penned more than a dozen books that imply a blurred division between the worlds of nature and humanity, a […]

by John Madera Brian Evenson’s fiction is peopled by estranged ciphers, paranoiac wanderers, hyper self-aware talking heads, broken but not beaten skeptics, philosophizing cutthroats, and no small number of maimed and dismembered. Over the course of ten books, most recently the story collection Fugue State (Coffee House Press) and a limited-edition novella, Baby Leg (New York Tyrant Books), Evenson […]

by Andrew Ervin Blake Butler is the author of the novella Ever (Calamari Press) and a novel-in-stories called Scorch Atlas (Featherproof Books). There’s no mistaking the singularity and utter strangeness of his texts—these are not “stories” any more than Gogol’s or the Brothers Grimm’s are. His sentences, as you’ll see even in this interview, don’t move in the […]

by Matthew Cheney James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel have spent the last few years exploring the borderlands of the realms known, for lack of better terms, as science fiction and literary fiction. Their explorations are chronicled in three surprising and provocative anthologies: Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology (2006), Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology (2007), and, most recently, The […]