Lydia Millet

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... the notable thing about Dinosaurs is that no deviancy bubbles beneath its surface ... The wholesomeness of it all, combined with Ms. Millet’s effortlessly readable prose, sometimes slips into blandness. I think that the chorus of voices in the author’s superb linked-story collection Fight No More (2018) makes for a more engaging way to dramatize quiet acts of compassion. But there is something new and unusual about Dinosaurs, even so. The novel is conscious of intractable global crises yet it focuses on local problems that can be confronted and overcome in honorable ways. It wants to pioneer a trail out of generalized despair and into active goodness.

Lucy Ives

Positive The Wall Street Journal Despair mixes with intellectual daring ... an academic satire expands into an ungainly portmanteau of texts and tales and literary forms ... The links connecting all this are tenuous and random; the sprawl, instead, creates a sense of profusion, the sort of thing aspired to in the maximalist heyday of David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo. What seems more contemporary, however, is the mechanical feeling of victimization that clings to the varied narratives and dampens the vigor of the prose. There is something wondrous and awful and bewildering in the conception of this big, inventive novel, but the writing never fully awakens to it.

Annie Ernaux, trans. by Alison L. Strayer

Rave The Wall Street Journal The comparatively shapeless entries show up the tension Ms. Ernaux feels between distillation and comprehensiveness. She labors to create small, perfectly measured narratives, but, as she comments in Getting Lost, \'a story is never finished\' ... Armed with her usual penetrating and aptly chosen descriptions, Ms. Ernaux progresses from the rustic war period to the material explosion during the Trente Glorieuses to the 1968 rebellions to the ambivalent liberalizations of the 1980s, and onward to the 21st century. As Ms. Ernaux’s experiences become reduced in the solvent of time, the pointed, intimate details drawn from them gain autonomy and can be claimed by anyone. \'Other people’s memories gave us a place in the world,\' she writes, and it is to the service of that process of orientation and self-knowledge that her highly original books have been devoted.

Helen DeWitt

Rave Wall Street Journal The latest from Helen DeWitt, an eccentric genius of our own day and age, is a delicious novella entitled The English Understand Wool ... With an impeccably straight face, Ms. DeWitt renders Marguerite’s prim, refined voice, in the process landing superb satirical shots at the publishing industry and the hypocrisies of the current marketplace for trauma narratives ... But no novelty attaches to this work, another of Ms. DeWitt’s classically understated comic jewels.

Andrew Sean Greer

Mixed The Wall Street Journal ... stands out by offering repetition rather than evolution. Mr. Greer is simply doing more of what worked, which makes it easy for readers to decide whether the book is for them ... For me, the suspense in Less Is Lost

Gayl Jones

Mixed The Wall Street Journal ... written conversationally and edged with absurdity and venomous sarcasm. The artist as self-centered bastard is a figure Ms. Jones ridicules but also reluctantly defends, and you can never quite tell whether the more macabre elements of The Birdcatcher are meant to be funny or serious.

Jonathan Escoffery

Positive The Wall Street Journal The unmistakable quirks and charms of the debut are present in Jonathan Escoffery’s collection ... Patriarchal conflict is Mr. Escoffery’s stubborn theme, which he enlivens with biting wit and his use of a wonderful Jamaican patois ... The focus on Trelawny is the surest sign that this is Mr. Escoffery’s first book. The younger brother is morose and self-involved and he does less of interest than any other character but appears the most because he is the sort of figure writers tend to identify with. (Mr. Escoffery goes to lengths to persuade us that his self-pity is justified, but I’m not certain that makes it less tiresome.) The stories that keep Trelawny in the background have noticeably more dramatic verve ... This accomplished story bodes well for the future: Nearly every young writer draws from autobiography, but it’s good to know that Mr. Escoffery doesn’t depend on it.

Ian McEwan

Rave The Wall Street Journal The accretion of personal histories is skillful but not obviously interconnected, and you read in anticipation of the big magician’s reveal that will tie the disparate subjects in a neat bow ... It turns out that the real revelation—and for me, the great appeal—of Lessons is that nothing like this ever comes about. Mr. McEwan has created a lost, likable protagonist whose \'shapeless existence\' militates against the imposition of any grand order of meaning ... Which is not to say that Lessons lacks drama, as Mr. McEwan builds toward reckonings between Roland and the two influential women in his life. Yet these scenes, while emotionally potent, are essentially inconclusive ... This is quietly touching, as is Mr. McEwan’s decision to cede his habitual narrative control to more naturalistic forces. Lessons is more formless than previous books, and less obviously brilliant. It is also wiser and closer to the bone.

A. M. Homes

Positive The Wall Street Journal Ms. Homes is good at exploiting holiday gatherings for seriocomic set pieces. Along with the political events, the one-two punch of Thanksgiving and Christmas plays a big role here. Scenes with Charlotte and Meghan are rich in outbursts and bewildered reconciliations ... There are oracular moments when their covert scheming about media manipulation and societal fracture darkly foreshadows our current political miasma. But just as often the gang comes off as bickering, over-privileged cranks playing at being power brokers to divert themselves from personal problems. Ms. Homes restlessly shifts between serious political critique, rollicking Pynchon-style absurdity and unabashed displays of sentiment. If the mixture leaves The Unfolding feeling somewhat gangly and unresolved it also saves it from falling into the ruts of ideological narrative. Beyond being good or bad, the characters in this impressive book are, above all things, unpredictable.

Maggie O'Farrell

Positive The Wall Street Journal Subtlety is sacrificed for the kind of pulsing intensity most often found in thrillers ... Ms. O’Farrell intelligently connects Lucrezia’s trapped circumstances with the art that her husband, a notable patron and collector, commissions to immortalize her ... There is a blinding power to the heightened, almost fetishistic beauty of Renaissance art, this novel suggests as it portrays a world of far greater brutality and fierceness.

Abdulrazak Gurnah

Rave The Wall Street Journal Honesty is perhaps the virtue that this novel, in its undemonstrative way, most extols ... Goodness is difficult to depict without becoming mawkish, but Mr. Gurnah does it superbly. This is owed, I think, to the masterly restraint of his storytelling, which patiently develops its characters and their fortunes without authorial interjections or overt literary effects. One can take away lessons and meanings from this novel, yet such things are perhaps less significant than the sheer seeming realness of the characters, whose presences Mr. Gurnah has faithfully crafted into existence, with all of their dreaming, their sorrow and their resilience.

Anna DeForest

Pan The Wall Street Journal ... is like a great deal of current American fiction in that its absence of plot, humor or distancing irony make it impossible to disambiguate the narrator’s voice from the author’s. The accusatory tone of the writing creates the suspicion that its systemic critiques are really privately held grievances. There is a paradox here: The narrator presents herself as the sole empathetic caregiver in a heartless big-city hospital, but the only feelings she ever seriously contemplates are her own. It eventually becomes clear that the illness invoked in the title is not a general condition but the narrator’s alone. \'How do you recover from anything?\' she asks. One hopes that this anguished book has helped in the process.

Kimberly Garza

Positive The Wall Street Journal The book crystallizes around one storm in particular—Hurricane Ike from 2008—which intensifies the quandary over leaving or staying. But even here the event is as unifying as it is destructive, bringing together the scattered cast in the collective work of reconstruction. Ms. Garza’s affection for Galveston is so heartfelt that she sometimes sticks bits of regional history into the chapters in clunky if charming ways, and the book ends with an annotated glossary of local terms. Artless perhaps, but every city would be lucky for such a tribute.

Adam Langer

Pan The Wall Street Journal With storytelling bravura, Mr. Langer alternates among the points of view of his characters. Though all are diverse in background, they share, with the author, an inclination toward scenery chewing. Everything is exaggerated in this book, whether it’s the gestures or the accents (one character speaks in jive; another in an unbearable Cockney-Aussie hybrid). The dialogue is often overtly scripted...There’s nothing wrong with this kind of shtick, but you wonder what Anne Frank ever did to get roped into it ... Topics like the #MeToo movement, illegal immigration and even the changing media landscape are rapidly incorporated into the dramas. As in all Trump-era fiction, the lessons of this novel rely on the assumption of a shared (liberal, suburban) politics, turning a hammy but outsized story into something extremely generic.

Marianne Wiggins

Positive Wall Street Journal [Wiggins\'] characters are given to the lively, comic backtalk of the golden-age Hollywood movies often filmed nearby. Tonally, this is tricky to reconcile with the running of a concentration camp ... Ms. Wiggins stresses that her characters are all honorable people doing their best in a bad situation, even working together to provide seed money and business opportunities for the dispossessed prisoners. The vigor and sweep of her writing has real rhetorical potency. I still don’t think this is a fit subject for Greatest Generation heroics but Properties of Thirst comes as close as anything will to persuading me.

Tess Gunty

Rave Wall Street Journal The aspect of unreality—albeit carefully constructed unreality—is central to Ms. Gunty’s presentation of American malaise, which occupies an unstable realm between portraiture and allegory. It is never altogether clear whether her characters are in the grip of some transformative religious awakening or simply suffering from untreated mental illness. The ambiguity is the source of this novel’s remarkable nervous energy. A feeling of genuine crisis—unrooted but ferociously tangible—propels the narrative through its many twists to the catharsis of its bizarre ending ... The tension is not uniformly unflagging. An extended middle section recounting Blandine’s doomed love affair with her high-school music teacher is out of proportion in both length and tone, seeming to belong to a more realistic coming-of-age debut. But this does little to offset the unnerving vision and conviction of the most promising first novel I’ve read this year.

Sidik Fofana

Rave Wall Street Journal It’s the particularity of those voices that makes Mr. Fofana’s debut a standout achievement. Each first-person story is written in vivid dialect, through which the characters’ backgrounds and personalities—and to an affecting degree, their destinies—are revealed. The conversational informality means that desperation is often delivered with wry humor ... American speech is an underused commodity in contemporary fiction and it’s a joy to find such a vital example of it here.

Jem Calder

Positive The Wall Street Journal The infusion of technical jargon throughout Mr. Calder’s balanced prose has an eerie effect on the stories, as though the algorithm had begun colonizing the writing as well. These are, broadly speaking, portrayals of the mess of millennial life in the vein of Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person, but the temperament is cooler and the corners are rounder, like on a MacBook Air. Generational zombification, in Mr. Calder’s penetrating depiction, has been a largely smooth and painless process, and there is no discontent brought about by the smartphone that the smartphone can’t also distract us from thinking about.

Alice Elliott Dark

Positive The Wall Street Journal The sense that these characters are still growing, despite their old age, contributes to the novel’s wonderful texture, its feeling of depth and ongoingness. Both women are superbly depicted, but Polly is the more memorable, partly because the reader (like Agnes) is prone to underestimating her ... there are passages following Polly’s sleepless musings that are fired with so much sadness and private satisfaction and unexpressed passion that they lift off the page ... If a friendship novel is by nature episodic rather than plot-driven, how can it end, except in the abrupt way that everything ends? Ms. Dark’s solution is to introduce a fairy-tale element that vaguely connects to Fellowship Point’s Native American religious heritage. Whether this works is probably a question of taste (it is not at all to mine). Ultimately, conclusions may matter far less than what people do while the story is still underway.

Gabrielle Zevin

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... engrossing ... Though it contains plenty of nostalgia for the pioneer age of 1990s game design, this isn’t primarily a novel of nerdy insider references ... Ms. Zevin’s great strength as a storyteller is her easygoing nature, and she’s mostly content to advance the novel slowly and patiently with well-realized landmark events. But the spell of her narrative is broken by a random explosion of violence in the novel’s final third, which introduces the sorts of traumas and mawkish life lessons characteristic of young-adult fiction ... Which makes me wonder if it’s possible for novels involving videogames to ever fully mature, even as relationships built on them continue. What do gamers do together when they grow up? Ms. Zevin’s pleasingly immersive book is on surest ground when exploring the meanings and metaphysics of play, an inherently youthful activity.

Morgan Talty

Mixed Wall Street Journal Not even Mr. Talty’s dark wit can compensate for the unrelenting amount of suffering his collection depicts. Readers of contemporary literary fiction are accustomed to their books rating high on the misery index; yet this collection’s catalog of addiction, abuse, neglect, injury, betrayal, death and despair adds up to a whole new level of human wretchedness ... Which creates the sense that there is more going on than the usual suspects of trauma and social injustice. David comments that his reservation is \'for the dead\' because it was built on a burial ground, but he also means something more bitter: There is no real life in this cursed place, only a shambling sort of living death, and the traditional spells that might have reversed the impulse to destruction have all been lost or forgotten.

Ottessa Moshfegh

Pan Wall Street Journal ... with the studied boredom of a teenager using swear words, Ms. Moshfegh piles on the barbarisms ... This stuff doesn’t even have the cheap integrity of the gross-out; it’s simply too puerile and dumb to excite any reaction beyond impatience. It’s normal for children to go through phases of insolence, but Ms. Moshfegh is on her sixth book, so what’s her excuse?

Aaron Sachs

Rave Wall Street Journal The trajectory that took Melville from youthful celebrity to total obscurity to, finally, posthumous renown as the author of the greatest of all American novels has become the stuff of legend, a parable about the mercurial ways of literary fortune...What remains unclear, though, is the lesson that ought to be drawn from it. Is it the bitter tale of a visionary doomed to go unappreciated in his time?...This ambiguity speaks to something profound about Melville’s life and work and serves as the crucial theme of Aaron Sachs’s Up From the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times, which emphasizes the \'offsetting forces\' of disenchantment and optimism, of failure and grandeur...Up From the Depths takes up the dialectic method so central to Melville’s writing for its unique investigation of parallel lives...Mumford is a fitting counterpart to Melville, both as his biographer and as an avid disciple who found in his subject the guidance to navigate his own tragedies and disappointments...At the core of the exploration is the question of how technology has shaped or deformed human behavior...Fittingly, Mr. Sachs’s chapters interweave periods of the two men’s lives, creating a dappled effect of shared shadows and light...Certain biographical overlaps are particularly striking...Both men, too, were hounded by depression—what Mumford called \'a bleak, Melvillean feeling of despair\'—and while Mumford enjoyed more critical favor than Melville, he couldn’t shake a similar sense of futility...Up From the Depths is on firmer ground—or rather, over deeper waters—when it returns to the subjects of renewal and rediscovery...

Aaron Foley

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... unfolds the romantic and professional misadventures of this group in the dishy, funny style of Armistead Maupin and Candace Bushnell, albeit with even more cheerfully raunchy sex ... And like Mr. Maupin’s and Ms. Bushnell’s iconic series, Boys Come First is also a tale of the city, in this case Detroit in the throes of gentrification. The dilemmas of family—and what such a thing might look like for gay men—are fruitfully bound up in broader questions of community as Detroit’s manic development threatens its identity. Mr. Foley knows the Motor City as intimately as he knows the workings of dating apps like Scruff and Grindr, and he details both with the swagger and fluency of a quality TV script. The only mystery, in fact, is which will come first: the HBO option or the sequel.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens

Mixed Wall Street Journal Disaster has a...abstract, consciously literary shape in Jessi Jezewska Stevens’s novel The Visitors ... Collapse is Ms. Stevens’s murmured theme ... The Visitors addresses it subjects through a blurry, somewhat hypnotic dance of symbols and signifiers. Ms. Stevens operates mostly by way of vague implications. Recurrent motifs such as looms and rainbows and Rubik’s Cubes are offered up—I suppose to suggest analogous codes and networks—but never developed. The gnome is mysterious largely because it’s given so little to do—something invented, it seems, in order to be ignored ... Obstinately sketchy and draft-like, a degree removed from whatever vivid thing the author must have imagined for it.

Andrew Holleran

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... quiet resolve, an exquisite eye for observation and (on the debit side) a slight habit of repetition ... There is a strange and urgent life force in The Kingdom of Sand, deriving from its delight in faithful description, that is inseparable from its inherent melancholy. And though it requires a little more patience than other books by Mr. Holleran, it builds to an amazing emotional pitch. The final chapter is either the saddest thing this author has ever written or the most subversively joyful—no small accomplishment whatever the case.

Peter C Baker

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... subtle and unsettling ... Complicated questions of complicity and responsibility emerge alongside planned local protests, yet the insistently uncomfortable thing about “Planes” is the ease with which these questions are put to the side. Although torture and extraordinary rendition are the novel’s headliner issues, almost all of its dramatic tension is bound up in whether or not Melanie’s husband will find out about her affair with Bradley. This discrepancy is, I believe, a feature rather than a bug, as it implicates the reader in a broader complacency. How smoothly are the politics in Planes overshadowed by the familiar excitements of a domestic crisis! The novel’s slyly muted ending is, perhaps, even more damning than any imagined confrontation.

Leila Mottley

Positive The Wall Street Journal Kiara’s retelling of these events is clipped, demotic and, apart from a few moments of emotional catharsis, focused on the brass tacks of staying alive. Her story becomes more and more gripping and desperate as the trap around her closes. Ms. Mottley accesses the feelings one sometimes has while reading Dickens, the breathless sense that some massive unfairness is being inflicted on a good and innocent person ... Kiara’s true outlet for hope is in the makeshift family of friends and relatives she manages to hold together. From such connections Ms. Mottley’s seemingly fatalistic book finds its buoyant humanity.

Alison Espach

Positive Wall Street Journal Anyone who grew up in the suburbs will recognize the kind of accident at the heart of Alison Espach\'s novel...High-schooler Billy Barnes is driving his girlfriend Kathy Holt and her younger sister Sally to school one morning; he isn\'t drunk and he isn\'t reckless but he\'s distractible and inexperienced, and, swerving from a deer, he hits a tree, killing Kathy...The novel is Sally\'s story, told when she is 28 and addressed to the memory of her sister...It is a confessional about the effects Kathy\'s death had on their Connecticut town, on their struggling parents and on Sally\'s own passage into adulthood...The novel is congruously funny...This is the humor of irony and conversational banter, the deflections used when intense grief threatens to overwhelm ordinary middle-class existence.

Nell Zink

Positive Wall Street Journal I like almost everything about Nell Zink’s comic novels and the merry chaos they bring to a rather static American book scene. I like their ridiculously overelaborate storylines and I like their willingness to end happily. I like Ms. Zink’s habit of direct address ... I like that the books are actually funny. Her customary lunacy is on display again in Avalon ... A dab of nonsense is the crucial component that keeps the discussions lively and entertaining ... Having set down so much praise, it feels churlish to complain about Avalon. But as my toddler says whenever I present him with a thoughtfully prepared meal, this isn’t my favorite ... The decision to deliver the novel from Brandy’s point of view doesn’t show Ms. Zink in her best light—the first-person voice is paradoxically more buttoned-up than her omniscient third-person narratives. And there’s a comparative shortage of comic set pieces here, as well as a needlessly fractured ending. But despite its seeming hastiness, its overall underdone quality, Avalon contains delights.

Jon Fosse tr. Damion Searls

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... masterly translation ... Mr. Fosse writes with no full stops, each unending sentence flowing imperceptibly between Asle’s memories and present actions and often incorporating his incantations of Latin prayers. The effect can be both mesmerizing and dulling, but there are moments when it reaches a pitch of extraordinary catharsis. Amidst a field of writers intrigued by the potential of religion, Mr. Fosse has created something of a different order: a work of art that itself approximates a religious experience.

Benjamin Myers

Rave Wall Street Journal Myers\'s duo of crop circlers consists of Redbone, a \'crust-punk\' hippie who dreams up increasingly complex geometric patterns, and Calvert, a severely traumatized veteran of the Falklands War who does the legwork of finding usable fields...The odd couple is united by a complementary hatred of England and love of its land and roots...Begun as a lark, the crop circles provide them a lifeline...Their shared code is to \'fuel the myth and strive for beauty\'...The contrasting public and private aspects of the stunt are shown in parallel...In the background, through invented newspaper clippings, we read of the growing media sensation surrounding the crop circles, the mass pilgrimages by UFO-spotters, and the farmers who make a mint charging for access...But Mr. Myers focuses more on the creative act itself...The chapters chronicle each midnight mission in the fields, depicting both the challenge to remain undiscovered and the illicit thrill of completion...Anonymity and secrecy are key to the work but also a source of deep melancholy, and the novel uncovers a plaintive connection between artistic transcendence and personal loneliness...The controversies attached to crop circles ultimately fade out behind the touching individual quests for meaning...\'The next one is always a beacon,\' the outcast artists think, \'beaming hope across the strange and haunted landscapes of their solitary existences.\'

Georgi Gospodinov, trans. by Angela Rodel

Rave Wall Street Journal Mr. Gospodinov...is a nostalgia artist ... His books are preoccupied with memory, its ambiguous pleasures and its wistful, melancholy attraction. He is most drawn to minor and personalized details ... The book flows between the remembered and the purely imagined as easily as it wanders through time ... The novel rambles among elaborations of its fantastical conceit, flashbacks to the narrator’s youth, and meditations on the current condition of Europe with no apparent cohesive structure. Caveat lector: This makes for an extremely diffuse and piecemeal book. But the absence of a stabilizing center of gravity is symptomatic of a continent still recovering from the hammer-blows of World War II and the Cold War ... Mr. Gospodinov also grasps the dangers of escapism ... This difficult but rewarding novel concludes with an image of Europe brought to the brink of renewed conflict—an abstraction that recent events have imbued with the terrible force of reality.

Emily Hall

Mixed Wall Street Journal An experimental novella obsessed with questions about the meaning—should any in fact exist—of experimental artwork ... She does her best ... Somehow none of these attempts seem to signify anything artistic. The silliness of the gestures and the absurd recursions of the narrator’s inner monologue give The Longcut a humorous flavor, though it is not the sendup of the contemporary art world that I briefly expected (and, I admit, sort of hoped for). Instead the wheel-spinning resolves in a final crescendo of stirring if desperate affirmations about the creative act, with its constant failures and essential hopefulness. For those few pages, at least, all the pointless frustration suddenly makes sense.

Hernan Diaz

Mixed Wall Street Journal Trust is a rich and prismatic—though ultimately anticlimactic—novel interested in the twin meanings of speculation, both the act of amassing wealth through the stock market and of creating stories to explain and define the past. Mr. Diaz’s method is to juxtapose competing interpretations of the life of his character Andrew Bevel ... Mr. Diaz’s skillful mimicry...pays real dividends in the complex portion of the book narrated by Ida, whose memories, not all of them reliable, mediate among the portrayals of Bevel created by his critics and the one Bevel sought to establish for himself ... A highly stimulating sense of narrative pressure builds up as the fictions invented around these enigmas collide and bleed into one another ... I am chagrined to say that much of this excellent work is undone in the concluding entries from Mildred’s diary, which effectively erase all of the novel’s finely poised mysteries. With these Mr. Diaz chooses straightforward explanation over ambiguity, leaving readers with a predictable—and, in itself, highly artificial—lesson about the way women have been written out of history. The coda left me with only one remaining unanswerable question: In the final estimation, just how good or bad is a good book with a bad ending?

Sara Baume

Rave Wall Street Journal In Sara Baume’s Sevem Steeples, a pair of \'solitary misanthropes\' named Isabel and Simon, or Bell and Sigh, leave Dublin for a decrepit rental house in a rural patch of southern Ireland ... With calm scrutiny and a vividly beautiful poetic touch, Ms. Baume describes the world they come to inhabit ... The easy strain of music in that brief litany is characteristic of Ms. Baume’s writing, as is the image of messy interconnectedness. In time, habit and isolation turn Bell and Sigh and their dogs into a kind of ungainly single organism specifically adapted to their narrow surroundings. No story is imposed on this gradual evolution (or devolution, perhaps). Ms. Baume only means to see it, and to make us see it as well, in all its oddness and silliness and tender fragility. She succeeds wonderfully.

Patrick McCabe

Mixed The Wall Street Journal ... evokes the expected 1970s trio of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll—the music of David Bowie, Mott the Hoople and of course the Pogues always seems to be blasting in the background—but the psychedelia has a demonic aspect that Dan and Una are prone to attribute to some malign spirit ... The notable feature, though, is the writing. This is free verse in the freest possible sense—nothing more, really, than line breaks imposed on an otherwise unbroken monologue. The style operates under the assumption that the Irish oral tradition is intrinsically poetic, which is true to an extent, but perhaps not to the extent that this verbose, frequently repetitive novel thinks. Mr. McCabe takes exaggerated liberties with the reader’s time and patience in the way that an elderly patron might with a stranger at a pub. There are plenty of outrageous stories, all delivered with unflagging flair, but prospective readers are advised to equip themselves like that cornered pub-goer: with a tall glass of whiskey at hand.

Michelle Huneven

Mixed Wall Street Journal Even after reading this novel, I still have no clear notion of what Unitarian Universalism is or what its beliefs entail, beyond its mandate to be uplifting and \'nonjudgy.\' Search puzzled me in a similar way: it’s amusing but not funny, sentimental but not dramatic, copiously detailed yet completely inconsequential—a cheerfully creedless novel about a \'creedless denomination.\'

Steve Almond

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... page-turning ... If there is a weakness to this book it is in the incongruity between the two paths it follows from this point onward. Marcus’s story, which involves a polygamous Mormon compound in Mexico, is bizarre and largely unbelievable. The official scapegoating of Antonio Saenz, however, is carefully and convincingly presented, building to a devastating portrayal of systemic injustice ... The novel’s dark, exciting ending finds Lorena searching for the missing scorpion researcher with the help of a police officer tormented by his role in railroading her brother. Mr. Almond’s writing is always swift and absorbing, even when the book grows somewhat miscellaneous, and a sense of enigma persists beyond the final explanations. There are some secrets that remain hidden simply because no one is willing to believe them.

Dan Chaon

Positive The Wall Street Journal Will is sweet, sentimental and severely traumatized (he microdoses LSD to stay upbeat)—appealing company if something of a stock character: the hit man with the heart of gold ... It’s wild and entertaining, don’t get me wrong. But I doubt it will trouble my dreams in the same way as its predecessor.

Antonio Scurati tr. Anne Milano Appel

Rave The Wall Street Journal The feeling of historical destiny that drives the narrative is so dramatically potent that it raises doubts in the reader’s mind. Is it possible that the portrayal of Mussolini as a masterful tactician who alone perceives the route to power has been over-determined, a known historical outcome conflated with an historical inevitability? There isn’t much room for randomness or luck in this depiction of events. Though nothing about the rise of Fascism has been softened or elided, the account sometimes seems like one that Mussolini himself would approve of. He may be evil and amoral but—in this volume at least—he never looks dumb ... This is unquestionably disturbing. Yet I would defend Mr. Scurati’s characterization on literary grounds. I have often heard readers wonder what the point of historical fiction is, and why anyone would read it rather than a good work of history proper. M: Son of the Century is not the book to turn to for an explanatory blow-by-blow of Mussolini’s rise to power, nor is it interested in presenting an objective, wide-angle view on the complex, interdependent factors that brought about his dictatorship ... What it does instead is re-create the sensations of the era: the dry-mouthed claustrophobia of looming confrontation, the bitterness of resentment and humiliation and the wild exhilaration of violent reprisal. Most of all, it makes us feel the perverse seduction of Fascism, which is connected to the universal allure of victory and control. Readers will find themselves swept up by the story, thrilled by its conflicts and strangely forgetful that its \'hero\' is a murderous despot. It’s a dangerous lesson for a novel to convey, but a profoundly important one.

Candice Wuehle

Positive Wall Street Journal Ms. Wuehle pursues her gonzo premise with satirical gusto, mixing together some curious brew of Robert Ludlum and Don DeLillo ... For much of Monarch there’s nothing to do except surf the strangeness and enjoy the ride ... The strangeness takes the more familiar form of a thriller. But the writing is still animated by the inexplicable ... A lively debut.

Joe Mungo Reed

Mixed The Wall Street Journal While Hammer is unfailingly entertaining it suffers from a nagging sense of disconnection ... Hammer has the smoothness of a good cable drama. It’s harmless fun, but all the discussion of groundbreaking artistic visionaries makes me wonder whether, in his heart of hearts, Mr. Reed aspires to something more original.

Eloghosa Osunde

Rave The Wall Street Journal Ms. Osunde discusses the draconian same-sex marriage prohibition bill passed in Nigeria in 2014, which even criminalizes public displays of affection, and her stories, increasingly animated by righteous anger, turn to covert relationships and the goings-on in secret gay nightclubs. A note of empowerment appears, turning this vitally written miscellany into a kind of rallying cry. It is in the hidden margins of a corrupt metropolis, the stories affirm, that truth and bravery are to be found.

Susan Straight

Mixed The Wall Street Journal The California depicted in Ms. Straight’s ambitious book is both heavy with history and dangerously unstable ... She goes about building that portrayal through an assemblage of loosely connected episodes that could fit just as easily in a story collection ... Johnny harbors the secret of a killing in the mountains when he was a young man and that event becomes implausibly tied to another drama involving an abandoned baby, providing the linked chapters with a soap-opera-worthy through-line. This uneasy composite of closely observed character sketches and bizarre melodrama make Mecca feel somewhat lumpy, as does the regular interjection of newsy events—fires, crackdowns by ICE officials, the racially motivated police shooting of an unarmed teenager, and so on. Yet Ms. Straight has the great virtue of being genuinely interested in her characters. She’s best in times of quiet, when she can live in their thoughts, and over the course of this involving novel nearly all of them come to stand out on the page, more textured and real than the scenarios contrived around them.

María Gainza, tr. Thomas Bunstead

Mixed The Wall Street Journal As in her striking if uneven debut Optic Nerve, Ms. Gainza proves herself a dab hand at concisely digesting artists’ lives, finding delight in idiosyncrasy and social rebellion ... The power of deception, and its usefulness in unsettling bourgeois certitudes, is central to the depictions, which draw from yet playfully fictionalize real periods in Argentine history ... But there is another level of dissimulation that seems at odds with this gamesome trickery. Cuellar, a real figure, was known by friends and admirers as La Negra, which is how Ms. Gainza refers to her in the Spanish text. The sobriquet has resonances with Ms. Gainza’s original title, La Luz Negra, or The Black Light, deriving from the tool used by art authenticators. But, presumably for reasons of political sensitivity, all of this has been scrubbed from Thomas Bunstead’s translation, in which Cuellar is only called Renée. A significant amount of racial and political subtext has thus been excised from Ms. Gainza’s book, which may account for its overall thinness. A bowdlerized version of a novel celebrating artistic radicals is a dispiriting kind of oxymoron.

Yevgenia Belorusets, tr. Eugene Ostashevsky

Positive The Wall Street Journal This juxtaposition of the pedestrian and the cataclysmic lends the sketches their sense of irreality, or what Ms. Belorusets calls \'that clinging bewilderment, the distractedness that does not let go.\' However unstable or absurdist it may appear, though, one vital aspect of daily living in Lucky Breaks is its insistence on continuing.Often, the writing turns tender and wistful. Some stories are about the sudden forging of close friendships, which the characters find just as unaccountable as war, but now unaccountably joyous. This, too, is the nature of a world defined by unpredictability.

Pankaj Mishra

Mixed The Wall Street Journal There is a great deal of eloquent commentary in this book—on Naipaul, on Modi, on life in rural India and in London literary salons alike. Mr. Mishra, a prolific writer of nonfiction, possesses a rare and intangible quality that you might call personality, which ensures that nothing he publishes will ever be boring (he is like Christopher Hitchens in this regard). But such a voice is not the same thing as literary style, and Run and Hide has little narrative nuance or storytelling guile, the things that typically distinguish works of fiction. Ultimately, Naipaul, whose novels are far more ambiguous than the lessons Aseem takes from them, comes away from the encounter unscathed.

Claire Messud

Positive The Wall Street Journal At the heart of the book is Alice’s awkward (if sometimes giddy) transformation into a member of the aristocracy. Ms. Messud is excellent on the complications of finding and managing household employees and hosting garden parties—or \'fetes,\' as the upper-crust primly call them. Carefully observed domestic details are thrown into relief by the sense of disorientation that undermines the narrative ... Not all of A Dream Life strikes me as successful. The ending, especially, is oddly anticlimactic considering the richness of the book’s characters and conflicts. But Ms. Messud is clearly well suited to the novella’s compact form, alive to the specifics of the sentences but able to draw back to see the mystery of the whole.

Yoko Tawada, tr. Margaret Mitsutani

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... possesses both the looseness and wistfulness of extreme displacement ... Ms. Tawada’s characters are similarly impressionistic: mobile, protean and evanescent, whirled together in a manner that can seem insubstantial but combines to form a vision of beauty and calm.

Antonio Di Benedetto, Tr. Esther Allen

Positive The Wall Street Journal The books [in the Trilogy of Expectation] have a spiritual kinship with Samuel Beckett’s postwar trilogy of monologue novels in their deadpan rendering of comic futility and monomania. The narrator’s voice is disturbed and disassociated, yet, somehow, strangely pithy and clarifying ... A vital difference from Beckett, however, is that di Benedetto’s fever dreams are lodged within the trappings of realism. The invasive din of traffic and machinery and dance halls is metaphoric but, for city-dwellers at least, will be distressingly familiar, and there may be many who come to understand the narrator’s journey into madness better than they might wish.

Hans Von Trotha tr. Elisabeth Lauffer

Positive The Wall Street Journal Mr. von Trotha is a German historian and journalist, and this sturdy, somber novel, translated by Elisabeth Lauffer, holds one’s attention more for its exploration of classical antiquities than for any literary flourishes. Pollak’s late-night meditations turn often to the intersection of art and empire.

Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell

Rave The Wall Street Journal There is a gentle joke in the title of Alejandro Zambra’s Chilean Poet that leads readers to expect some kind of highbrow Künstlerroman while actually delivering a novel of domesticity filled with prosaic records of daily life. This is partly because, as Mr. Zambra teases, Chile has so many damn poets that the calling has lost its mystique and become a national industry. But the greater meaning has to do with the difficult poetic potentiality for inspiration and transcendence, which this splendid book finds in family relationships as much as in artistic creation ... moves deftly among different points of view, arriving at Vicente’s maturation—inevitably, he too becomes a moody wannabe poet. His complicated reunion with Gonzalo is one of the best endings to a novel that I have read in years, a scene of beautiful emotional improvisation.

Julie Otsuka

Pan The Wall Street Journal [Two] discrete parts are connected—and, for me at least, further muddled—by Ms. Otsuka’s striking use of pronouns. The opening sections are narrated with the first-person plural \'we.\' But sections concerning the memory residence adopt the second-person \'you.\' These are different voices, one choral, one individual, and it isn’t clear to me how they relate, or how they relate to the reader. This is a painful, personal story that feels oddly constrained by its formal conceits.

Jennifer Haigh

Mixed The Wall Street Journal There’s a great deal of disgruntled vitality in this novel, which unfolds during a succession of snowstorms ... But while Mercy Street is terrifically readable, it lacks some of the friction of [Haigh\'s previous novel] Heat and Light simply because many of its scenes (especially those involving Victor Prine) depict people alone on their computers. Technology poses a problem that the social novelist has not yet resolved: If no one meets in person any more, how do you make the sparks fly?

Adrian Nathan West

Rave The Wall Street Journal This debut offers an acute, painfully funny front-row view of a midlife crisis in action. Mr. West writes in the vein of what has been called dirty realism, bringing style and erudition to the subject of Middle American drudgery. Unfurnished apartments, tacky mall restaurants and public buses are all depicted in unflattering close-ups ... Under the microscope are the strange habits of men who are incapable of discussing their emotions with one another yet constantly reveal them in the most tortured, vulnerable ways. The narrator’s father, ridiculous and resilient, is a desperately touching character and I was anxious for the book to not make too much fun of him. Apart from a misbegotten final sentence, it doesn’t—Mr. West is unsparing but tender. His narrator is also a man, after all, yearning for love but with no idea how to ask for it.

Sheila Heti

Rave The Wall Street Journal There are aspects of “Pure Colour” that seem merely whimsical or dippy, but the long passages that flow from the death scene, and the fables invented to encompass and poeticize it, are by far the best writing Ms. Heti has ever done and alone make this book well worth reading. These chapters are forthright, attentive, unembarrassed, radiant with wonder, serious yet feather-light—and, to me, courageous in their willingness to plunge so wholeheartedly into the unknowable ... the fantastical quality of Pure Colour has given her the unfettered freedom to create, in the knowledge that every creation can only be provisional, a flawed first draft. Uncertainty is the paradoxical binding agent of Ms. Heti’s myth-making and this lovely book.

Douglas Stuart

Rave The Wall Street Journal Shuggie Bain is powerful but grueling, a repetitive, marathon depiction of alcoholism. But the crafted storylines in Young Mungo develop with purpose and converge explosively, couching all the horror and pathos within a tighter, more gripping reading experience—an impressive advancement, in other words, from an already accomplished author.

Marlon James

Rave The Wall Street Journal Mr. James’s epic takes place in a fantastical precolonial Africa and it draws deeply on the stories preserved from the oral traditions of kingdoms in present-day Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Ghana and elsewhere. Because these empires antedate the influence of Christianity or Islam, their visions of the world, from cosmologies to sexual mores, are wildly unfamiliar, and that scintillating strangeness infuses the books’ sprawling cast of monsters, magicians and mercenaries ... Mr. James is such a ferociously powerful and fast-paced storyteller that one rarely has time to worry about the grander scheme of the plot. Although the book covers a huge span of time, no grass grows between the action. Galvanized by a vernacular writing style modeled on the oral tradition of African griots, the scenes are ribald, declamatory and quick to confrontation. Events are so crazed and swirling they become almost hallucinatory. What the larger picture amounts to, when considered from a distance, remains something of a puzzle ... It is this trilogy’s prodigious passions, and not any obvious narrative purpose, that make it so gripping.

Sandro Veronesi, Tr. Elena Pala

Positive The Wall Street Journal The protagonist...can\'t see what\'s coming at him. Mr. Veronesi sharpens this irony by scrambling the presentation of Marco’s life, alternating between scenes of his youth and his snake-bitten adulthood, and frequently introducing the aftermath of an event before its origins. (Scenes of his acrimonious divorce, for instance, precede the story of his marriage.) This makes knowing gods of readers: we’re aware of every trap he blindly marches into. It’s a blunt but effective means of portraying him as a hostage to fate. The novel’s most memorable set pieces—one takes place at a high-stakes gambling hall, another describes the freak occurrences that save Marco from an airplane crash—evoke the designs of an unknown cosmic order ... It’s a stirring portrait, as Mr. Veronesi is an expert at playing on the reader’s deepest fears and hopes in emotionally involving ways—though for me the manipulations in the novel’s redemptive ending passed the limits of credulity. But there is no clear line that separates how much higher meaning readers want to believe in and how much they can finally accept.

Sarah Manguso

Positive The Wall Street Journal Much of Very Cold People wields a kind of detached, anthropological power, portraying the world through the accumulation of telling details. But abruptly, near the end, the narrator has an awakening to the terrible reason for her mother’s repression, a trauma that afflicts young women that runs even deeper than class. The diagnosis is not new—just the opposite—but it is startling to find the narrator bursting into passionate appeals after so much cold-eyed recollection.

David Sanchez

Positive The Wall Street Journal Though the book is invigorated by the bite of authenticity, the story it unfolds is necessarily unoriginal—indeed, as Mr. Sanchez recognizes, a fear of recovery clichés is one of recovery’s major obstacles. Yet what makes this debut stand out are its fascinating philosophical qualities. While the narrator flashes back to memories of his childhood, he does not connect his addictions to some buried trauma but rather to a more general and inexplicable terror of his own mind ... The depths that Mr. Sanchez depicts may be specific to the experiences of the most down-and-out addicts; the moving journey back into the world has universal application.

Olga Tokarczuk, Tr. Jennifer Croft

Rave The Wall Street Journal Dense, monumental ... he novel recapitulates an astonishing amount of esoteric learning. Ms. Tokarczuk is as comfortable rendering the world of the Jewish peasantry as that of the Polish royal court. And she has made matters even more challenging for herself—and certainly for her readers—by adopting an experimental narrative technique that draws back from the dramatization of historical events to explore the question of salvation, and of humankind’s perpetual longing for it ... An incredibly juicy tale of villainy and intrigue, yet the striking thing about The Books of Jacob is that Ms. Tokarczuk has taken advantage of almost none of the story’s inherent drama ... The pace of events never slackens—there is plague, betrayal, imprisonment, war, exile, death and succession—but their presentation is distant and uninvolved, conveyed in summaries rather than engaged re-enactments ... The treatment of messianic passions through an attitude of Zen detachment is so pointedly ironic that it colors every aspect of the novel, making this a curiously abstracted historical epic. In Jennifer Croft’s translation—a feat of tremendous diligence and care—the prose remains urbane and unruffled whether it describes religious ecstasy or sickening violence. On the practical level, this makes reading the novel extremely slow going ... There are important exceptions to the governing dispassion, however, and they concern the medley of side characters...whom Ms. Tokarczuk allows herself to inhabit more intimately ... Difficult and rewarding ... Encyclopedic, impersonal, incalculably rich in learning and driven by a faith in the numinous properties of knowledge.

Hanya Yanagihara

Pan The Wall Street Journal The essential conflicts in the connected sections are familiar from A Little Life: the struggle to care for the \'fragile or different or damaged\' and the tension between protection and stifling repression. But although To Paradise is just as big and grueling and terror-strewn as its predecessor, the result is strangely lifeless. Indeed—and not even detractors would say this about A Little Life—it’s boring. How did that happen? ... The problem, to my mind, goes back to Ms. Yanagihara’s strength as a sentimental storyteller and her lack of interest in ideas or root causes. A Little Life narrows itself down as it advances until its frame contains almost nothing beyond its tormented hero. But the structure of To Paradise means that it must work by accretion, imbuing recurring objects, actions and motifs with accumulated meaning. But Ms. Yanagihara doesn’t really do metaphor, as odd as that sounds, so while the novel’s many echoes are apparent the reasons for them are not ... There is no particular exploration into gender hierarchies here...nor is there any real curiosity about the different conditions experienced by homosexuals across eras ... As far as I can tell, Ms. Yanagihara is just randomly switching stuff around ... The suspicion of pointlessness settles upon To Paradise early and makes the effort to sort out the details of its multiple settings hard to commit to. This is a novel steeped in politics and sociology by an author who seems defiantly indifferent to such matters.

Claire-Louise Bennett

Mixed The Wall Street Journal ... the key to Checkout 19 is its principled refusal to entirely wise up ... The language is showy in the precocious way of young writers who take profound pleasure in deploying fancy words ... This grows self-indulgent, of course. Mimicking juvenilia yields both freshness and triviality. But book lovers will identify enough not to mind Ms. Bennett’s stubborn naiveté, especially when it brings about jubilant passages[.]

John Edgar Wideman

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... probing, exploratory ... remarkable stylistic range ... Mr. Wideman is one of the great tragedians of American literature ... A sense of existential mystery that transcends time binds together the many and disparate voices the stories assume...[a] technique of blending together elements of ancestry, history, philosophy and literary theory into a somber, incantatory unified whole ... this collection, Mr. Wideman’s artistic consummation, is also the site of his unraveling, and there are moments of unbearable vulnerability when the author puts aside his great gifts to lie down in the rag and bone shop of the heart.

László Krasznahorkai, Tr. John Batki

Mixed The Wall Street Journal The novella reads much like a parable of Kafka’s, but it invokes the wanderings of Homer’s Odysseus ... The mood of paranoia is conveyed by the author’s signature long, pulsing, run-on sentences, although the translation by John Batki is much more casual than the virtuosic work of Mr. Krasznahorkai’s usual collaborator, Ottilie Mulzet. Slang phrases like \'in a hot second\' tend to disrupt the writing’s hypnotic effect. More successful is the novella’s packaging as a multimedia art object. Accompanying the text are eerie illustrations by Max Neumann and percussive, arrhythmic music by Szilveszter Miklós, which is accessed by QR codes at the start of each chapter.

Robin McLean

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... suspenseful, disorienting ... where Mr. McCarthy is grandiose and portentous, Ms. McLean is strikingly down-to-earth. Her characters may amuse themselves with flights of philosophizing, but mostly they bicker, wisecrack and daydream, their behavior—crude but engaging, and often even endearing—so grippingly at odds with their drift into savagery. It sounds impossible but for all its horrors, there is little that is lurid about the writing in Pity the Beast. I have never read a book that made evil seem so natural—which is both the most unsettling thing about this novel and its greatest accomplishment.

Tom McCarthy

Pan The Wall Street Journal Only an author so zealously devoted to a particular theory of literature could produce a novel as boring as this one, which promotes the theory at the expense of everything else. The characters are nothing more than proper names. The scenes exclusively focus on in-depth workplace conversation, briefly interrupted only when people order food. The language is an immense composite of colorless technical jargon ... Since Mr. McCarthy thinks that writing is about retransmitting pre-existing ideas, he likely does not care that his novel cribs so heavily from Don DeLillo ... But The Making of Incarnation, being evangelical, lacks Mr. DeLillo’s humor, his pleasure in absurdity. If the novelist ne plus ultra is a computer then so is its ideal reader, and reading itself becomes a matter of scanning texts for codes and patterns. Enjoyment doesn’t enter into it.

Sarah Hall

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... if every pandemic-inspired novel has half the intensity of Ms. Hall’s short, acrid book then my worries will be misplaced ... Ms. Hall’s rendering...is sensual and messy, hot on the page. And when the bliss of Edith and Halit’s confinement is transformed into agony by the intrusion of the virus the writing loses none of its rough, demanding physicality. The paradox of passion is always at the fore of the story.

Susan Daitch

Rave The Wall Street Journal Historical reconstruction takes both figurative and literal forms in Susan Daitch’s ingenious contrapuntal novel ... [a] brutal motif, as well as the novel’s mangled chronology and open-ended, fragmentary sections, makes Siege of Comedians sound something like Roberto Bolaño’s gothic 2666. Yet for all its latent darkness, the novel is inquisitive rather than morbid, exhibiting a boundless curiosity in its characters’ unusual professions, a delight in the uncanny ways that history connects and repeats itself and a quixotic sense of hope that whatever has been lost to time might, one day, be found and restored.

Susan Daitch

Positive Chicago Review of Books \"It’s a particular joy to find oneself immersed in the minutiae of complicated, highly specialized work, and Daitch excels at zooming in and making us feel like experts ... three novellas, each of which could easily stand on its own...can be read as a meditation on the nature of storytelling, Siege of Comedians drills down one level further, to the building blocks of communication itself ... Some readers will surely find Siege of Comedians a bit dizzying. Indeed, it can be a challenge to keep track of the many names, places, timelines, and histories without feeling under siege yourself. But the experience of thinking about Siege of Comedians in the days and weeks after consuming it is your reward for the effort that a close reading of this novel requires. \

Gary Shteyngart

Pan The Wall Street Journal Mr. Shteyngart’s exploration into the pleasures and pitfalls of the American Dream is infused with the sort of liberal guilt that requires that all portrayals of luxury be accompanied by performances of abasement ... Mr. Shteyngart is a comic writer, yet he embodies this attitude far more than he satirizes it. \'Most of literature is about privileged people being unhappy,\' the Southern writer argues, and you often wish the book weren’t so tortured about the claim ... there are amusing nods here in the direction of Anna Karenina and Uncle Vanya. But the book’s silly plot twists—love triangles, betrayals, public scandals, the appearance of a menacing stranger and of course a collision with mortality—have much more in common with the kind of prestige cable melodrama that Sasha is trying to get off the ground. A pandemic novel that counts as a work of escapism is something of a feat, though the author himself doesn’t seem quite convinced.

Paul Auster

Positive The Wall Street Journal Paul Auster has written some unexpected books before now...but none so surprising as this one ... One of the strong points of Burning Boy is Mr. Auster’s attention to domestic detail ... Crane as presented here is morally irreproachable (likewise Cora), his literary achievements beyond criticism ... The editors of a biography this long might have asked its author for at least a full bibliography, if not a chronology into the bargain. They might also have advised Mr. Auster that his 21st-century squirming over his hero’s occasional insensitivity toward black, American Indian and Semitic peoples is unnecessary. It is nonetheless surprising to recall that Crane’s novel of America’s Civil War includes a single passing reference to an African-American. There is much to enjoy in this tour of what John Berryman, in his penetrating short biography of 1950, called the \'majesty and trash\' of Crane’s work—a phrase that can be applied equally to the life.

Mark McGurl

Pan The Wall Street Journal Everything and Less...relies on the flash and surprise and ingenuity of its arguments to distract you from the sleight-of-hand taking place in the background. Mr. McGurl’s impressive ambitions—his willingness to synthesize huge and diverse periods of literary history—is hardly in doubt ... Mr. McGurl has a funny chapter on the explosion of fetish lit ... The question is whether these increased opportunities in \'authorpreneurship\' affect the people principally motivated to express themselves artistically. Here the arguments grow more vague ... what is maddening about Everything and Less is how little literary analysis it actually contains. Mr. McGurl has the obnoxious habit of simply reiterating his claims without demonstrating them ... The absence of both wide-angle historical context and close textual reading makes Everything and Less a very curious kind of literary study, one startling enough to demand attention but too thin to successfully hold it. In many ways it most resembles that paradigmatic Amazonian genre, the apocalyptic fantasy, imaginatively suggesting an alternative present in which customer desire is the single criterion determining literary creation. Mr. McGurl, for all his adventurousness, reifies this dystopian vision by adopting the language of commodification. There is hardly a mention in this book of aesthetics, or morality, or uncertainty, or truth—only of production and consumption, demand and fulfillment. But we are captives to an age only insofar as we submit to its terms.

Asali Solomon

Mixed Wall Street Journal The Days of Afrekete...intertwines a biting satire of upper-middle-class mores with a wistful love story ... Ms. Solomon lands some excellent blows in her depiction of the personalities and posturing that fill the dinner party ... The flashbacks with Selena, which are briskly recapped rather than fully dramatized, lack the same vividness, creating an ironic imbalance, since the novel means to champion the challenging, heterodox life Liselle and Selena might have dared to make together above the conventional one Liselle settled for. Ms. Solomon brings the novel to a climactic reunion scene that is sweet but frustrating—it is here, at the book’s conclusion, that I was most eager to discover what might happen next.

Elizabeth Strout

Rave Wall Street Journal Elizabeth’s Strout’s Lucy Barton novels, of which Oh William! is the latest, have become essential to the contemporary canon by taking a wider view on the interpersonal responsibilities...shared among a society bound by its traumas ... This story...is well told, though one can’t shake the sense that its details are slightly beside the point. When trauma is universal, its specifics are interchangeable ... [Lucy\'s] thoughts are pulled by two conflicting impulses: the self-absorption of addressing one’s own sorrows and the selflessness of acknowledging those of others ... This is a struggle beset by confusion...but it’s a lucid, disarming, wholly approachable kind of confusion, one that bespeaks humility rather than despair.

Claire Vaye Watkins

Rave The Wall Street Journal The brazenly frank depiction of Claire’s bad behavior offers constant reminders of just how sharp and funny Ms. Watkins’s writing can be ... Her unapologetically self-involved wanderings from therapy to drugs to extramarital flings have some of the depraved zaniness of a Hunter S. Thompson road trip. For a time the narrative seems animated by the same death drive that has possessed its heroine, and if the depths it reaches are disturbing they are also strangely exhilarating ... But this doesn’t last, and soon enough Ms. Watkins pulls out of free fall and back toward respectability, obedient to the formula of confession and absolution that describes nearly every work of autobiographical fiction ... The evidence of her rehabilitation is that she is able to write again, yielding the book we have just read. And so at last readers perform their true function in relation to this novel: as witnesses to the author’s therapeutic breakthrough.

Benjamin Labatut tr. Adrian Nathan West

Positive The Wall Street Journal This fleet, darkly dazzling survey of modern innovations in chemistry illustrates the unbreakable bond between horror and beauty, life-saving and life-destroying ... Given a fine, exacting translation from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West, these pieces possess an insidiously persuasive power, even if one senses the dice have been loaded in the portrayals that make all the scientists madmen and monomaniacs prone to febrile ravings. The famous elegance of quantum field theory, likewise, receives no discussion here. Instead, this book—as haunting as it is erudite—stubbornly insists on connecting the wonders of scientific advancement to the atrocities of history, creating a morality play with no obvious moral but much to keep the reader awake at night.

Randy Boyagoda

Positive The Wall Street Journal Prin first appeared in Mr. Boyagoda’s 2018 novel Original Prin, and while Dante’s Indiana can be read on its own, newcomers to the series may have a tough time getting up to speed on this character’s unlikely history (he survived a terrorist bombing in the first book) and the reasons for his estrangement from his wife, Molly, with whom he has four daughters. When the novel gains momentum, however, it mixes the outrageous social satire of George Saunders or Salman Rushdie with Prin’s more solemn and inward religious searching. The unique result juxtaposes the ridiculous and the sublime—fitting as both an homage to Dante and a portrayal of America.

Jon McGregor

Mixed The Wall Street Journal Robert’s painstaking recuperation from the stroke occupies the rest of the book, which pays special attention to his diminished capacity to speak. Long, grueling passages depict these struggles, and Mr. McGregor presents them with much the same obsessive stylistic mastery as displayed in the storm scene. There is something a little bit punishing about this single-minded demonstration of skill. The meanings of the actual story seem curiously unexplored and the redemptive ending almost an afterthought. Memorable writing, yes, but I still don’t really get what happened out there in Antarctica.

Gayl Jones

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... that rare thing, a life’s work ... It is the first half that is the most clear and accessible, and which affords far more of the traditional pleasures of historical fiction ... Ms. Jones has always sought to imbue her writing with musicality, and if previous first-person voices drew upon blues singing and jazz riffs, Almeyda’s reminiscences are mellifluous and subdued, almost murmured, holding the reader’s attention not through emphasis but a kind of determined incantatory rhythm. There are no dramatic rises and falls here, only the solemn aggregation of events, as of knowledge, and this is most conspicuous in Ms. Jones’s choice to elide the destruction of Palmares entirely, explaining it only after a leap ahead in time to when Almeyda is wounded and alone ... the novel’s momentum grinds pretty much to a halt. There is a sense that each discrete episode, clearly the product of years of contemplation, is intended to be read and studied independently rather than experienced within the flow of a narrative. Palmares comes to resemble a kind of wisdom book, trading away plot for parables ... Might that account for its abrupt, exhausted and completely anticlimactic ending? One puts down Palmares with a feeling that this book is not just unfinished (and Ms. Jones has written poems imagining Almeyda’s children, so perhaps there is more story to come) but unfinishable, one of those works whose questions and mysteries will be occupying its creator until the end of her life. Whether one is drawn to or warned away by the book’s challenges, this much is certain: It is unlike anything else that will be published this year.

Laurent Bienet tr. Sam Taylor

Rave The Wall Street Journal The details of the Inca ruler’s eventual conquest of Western Europe are so surprising in their ingenuity and so deliciously funny that I want only to regale you with all of them ... Mimicking the sober, informational style of historical epics, and seamlessly translated from the French by Sam Taylor, Civilizations constructs an alternate timeline that is at once an exquisitely ironic funhouse-mirror reflection of the past and, in itself, a wonderfully exciting account of political and military intrigue. The flourishes are irresistible ... Enriching the entertainment of these inventions is the deep-lying sense of subversion created by a record in which history is not ordained or inevitable ... as this sublime book shows, the supremacy of chance makes history no less thrilling to contemplate.

Atticus Lish

Rave The Wall Street Journal This is coming-of-age fiction in extremis...and the reader is dragged well beyond safe emotional boundaries as well. The poise of Mr. Lish’s writing makes this bleak story so dangerously absorbing. Gloria’s inexorable degeneration from ALS is charted with devastating care and observational finesse ... This is a far fuller novel than I can indicate here ... A brutal murder late in the proceedings carries it toward the formulas of Boston crime noir, somewhat weakening Mr. Lish’s spell. But the powerfully ambiguous ending brings to a fitting close a remarkable portrait of a sensitive boy forced into a life of hardness and violence.

Kia Corthron

Rave Wall Street Journal Novelist Kia Corthron has designed a character well positioned to confound a priori judgments ... Narration is distributed democratically, and dialect—fine-tuned for each character based on race, class and education—is a great humanizing force, even when the story takes its cruelest turns ... Theo is the lone narrator in Moon and the Mars, but her voice is so rich with the locutions and grammatical tics of her joint heritage that it sounds almost choral ... The novel’s scrupulosity and broad-mindedness are refreshing virtues, but they aren’t always consistent with stirring drama. In order to give voice to all sides of an issue Ms. Corthron has to engage in a truly vast amount of explanation ... Ms. Corthron’s humility and curiosity match her outsize intellect and ambition. Her big, immersive novel almost never sermonizes; it is, however, eager to teach.

Joy Williams

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... a blackly comic portrait of futility ... This is sarcasm of a high, artistic order, reminiscent of no one quite so much as William Gaddis. The story occupies the boundary of absurdity and incomprehension in the same way that humankind exists on the verge of annihilation, perpetually undermining itself in the process of rebuilding. The book’s structure is equally volatile ... This seems perverse until one recalls that it’s what Moby-Dick does, as well. Ms. Williams’s novel, a work of strange, disruptive \'holy havoc,\' presents a ship of fools adrift in a drowning world.

Richard Powers

Pan The Wall Street Journal As always in Mr. Powers’s novels, the science itself occasions the most involving passages, and Decoded Neurofeedback is energized by the strange and tantalizing prospect of mainlining the behavioral essence of one’s loved ones straight into the mind. How this actually works is secondary to its potential psychological effects. For Mr. Powers, science is fully analogous to art in its mysteriousness, creativity and healing potential ... Maybe the problem, then, is that this book doesn’t have enough science to work with. Set amidst a caricatured version of the Trump presidency (which you wouldn’t think required caricature), it sketches a society that has turned against its researchers, accelerating its route to climate collapse. The one-dimensional dynamic of political messaging bleeds into the characterizations. On every page, in every interaction, Robin is entirely defined by his sorrow over his mother and his linked outrage at environmental destruction. Plot events are obedient to an equally simplistic mode of cause and effect ... Has Mr. Powers ever written a novel with less capacity for surprise than Bewilderment? I’ve read most of them and I don’t think so, and it’s hard not to connect this novelistic narrowing with the contraction in the genre of science and nature writing to works of doomsday proselytizing. The trend is melancholy even if it’s justified. Despair is an impatient muse; it doesn’t have much time for art.

Lauren Groff

Positive The Wall Street Journal Death, disaster and abuses of power are as frequent as Marie’s triumphs, and all are depicted with a degree of detail and specificity that make this historical fantasy feel far more real than the rickety allegorizing of Ms. Groff’s highly praised earlier novels ... For all its moral ambiguities, though, it is finally its spirit of celebration that gives this novel its many moments of beauty.

Jo Hamya

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... the tone of the novel...conveys the banality of professional failure with a clear-eyed absence of histrionics. The grandeur of England’s past provides a honed edge of irony ... This is a book about waiting for a reality that no longer exists. It necessarily has few secondary characters and no drama, and while you wouldn’t want Ms. Hamya to always write under such narrow limitations, her intelligence and stylistic restraint make this snapshot of England all the more damning.

Hilma Wolitzer

Rave The Wall Street Journal What an astonishing amount of family love, confusion and sadness Hilma Wolitzer fits into the short stories in Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket ... The book comes to a fiercely affecting conclusion in The Great Escape, written last year, in which Paulette and Howard, nearing their 90s, face a frightening new challenge: the coronavirus pandemic. Somehow, this heartbreaking story is infused with the same candor and comedy as those written in the 1960s. It’s an unforgettable ending to a wonderful collection.

Miriam Toews

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... a loose, unbuttoned work in contrast, more interested in colorful character studies than coherent plotting ... aims for hopefulness, as well, extracting a kind of madcap euphoria from the most painful struggles. \'Joy is resistance,\' Swiv’s grandmother tells her, and if the motto can feel cutesy it inspires lovely moments of tenderness and humor.

Jonas Eika, tr. Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... reads a bit like Thomas Pynchon taking on late capitalism. The writing is surrealistic, granular in its details, and concerned with social entropy and desperate attempts at communion ... In a translation of unsettling intensity by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, the stories derive much of their force from their insistence on transformation. Not only do the settings and characters abruptly alter, as in a dream, but the mood can instantly switch from light to dark.

Rabih Alameddine

Pan The Wall Street Journal The compromise the novel strikes is, alas, cautious and unsatisfying. In place of a story, Mina recounts small interactions and collegial chats alongside personal memories and choice anecdotes. All this is warm and disarming...but it quickly comes to seem like filibustering ... Mr. Alameddine follows in the popular and lamentable trend of making his own novelistic failures part of the texture of the narrative. \'Metaphor seems useless now, storytelling impotent,\' the fictional Alameddine complains, but absent those there’s just . . . talk.

Meredith Westgate

Mixed The Wall Street Journal What’s it like to have one’s consciousness tinkered with in this way, so fundamentally and so easily? Ms. Westgate reproduces some of the effects of the drugs—an italicized voice competing with Sophie’s internal monologue; a slide reel of images from Lucien’s grandmother’s past—but for the most part the ramifications of memory alteration are left unimagined. Los Angeles, rather than the landscape of the mind, is the novel’s most developed setting. The cast of Left Coast archetypes...is entertaining, but it’s hard not to think that after a breakthrough as frightening as Memoroxin, the world would be a much less recognizable place.

Sally Rooney

Mixed The Wall Street Journal The actual issue Beautiful World, Where Are You struggles with is not whether to exist but how. How, that is, to reconstruct the traditional marriage plot for a generation that no longer believes in marriage, or, really, in any of the foundational verities—monogamy, parenthood, property—that once gave people (and books) their direction ... Ms. Rooney’s writing strengths continue from her previous novels. The incongruous pairing of Alice and Felix is not as sexy as the one in Conversations With Friends (which matched an ordinary girl with a hunky actor) but it still generates friction. And the sex scenes—which in the author’s signature style are presented largely through dialogue—impressively capture a wide and subtly graduated range of sensations ... Her technical weaknesses, though, haven’t changed either. The writing is stuffed with empty descriptions of people lighting cigarettes, opening wine bottles, scrolling smartphones and so on, creating a tonal flatness that is aggravated by the complete absence of irony. This is a novel that asks readers to take the characters exactly as seriously as they take themselves—an impossibility, when they are prone to adolescent outbursts ... we are finally defeated by the humorless, almost wounded quality of the narration from an author who has not established any psychological distance from her characters.

David Hoon Kim

Pan The Wall Street Journal Henrik’s narration, which stretches over more than a decade, is portioned into halting episodes about friends and lovers whose role in his life tend to be spectral and short-lived ... The book’s most arresting chapter is an outlier narrated by a medical student who dissects Fumiko’s corpse ... From this ghostly Paris comes a sensitive, vague and often maddeningly insubstantial novel. Its frustrations are illustrative of a crisis in the subject and form of a literature that takes trauma to be the defining quality of personhood ... because Mr. Kim’s [Paris] is characterized by an inviolable sense of detachment, it is doomed to remain unrealized, a shadowy backdrop for his sad hero’s tail-swallowing cycle of fear and regret.

Agustín Fernández Mallo, tr. Thomas Bunstead

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... fascinating ... The free-associations make this a lengthy, extremely self-indulgent book that will at some point try even the most generous reader’s patience, but the reward for perseverance is a unique work that captures an uncanny aspect of the lonely but bewilderingly overpopulated contemporary experience.

Sunjeev Sahota

Positive The Wall Street Journal Mr. Sahota’s previous novel is the 2015 immigrant saga The Year of the Runaways, and beside that terrifically imagined triple-decker China Room feels somewhat quaint and rounded off, perhaps more of a pet project (it appears to spring from the author’s ancestral history). Even so, it forges telling and skillful connections between the two very different eras, showing the ways that a place—a house, a room—can store up pieces of a remarkable past and release them, generations later, when someone comes looking.

Shirley Jackson, Ed. by Laurence Jackson Hyman

Positive The Wall Street Journal Her fiction, full of misanthropy, madness and murder, tends to be viewed through the lens of her personal torments and, more generally, of the misogyny of the age. What is striking about Jackson’s letters, however, is that while they testify to pretty outrageous domestic double standards (Hyman was a man unwilling to even heat up a bowl of soup for his lunch), they show very little sign of unhappiness. The mood of the missives is buoyant, garrulous and eager to amuse, and while Jackson often seems stressed and exasperated, she’s rarely despairing. The merry anarchy in the world she evokes has a lot in common with the scenes evoked in her hilarious motherhood memoirs ... The labors of domesticity and artistry are fused in these letters in a way that seems to me unique.

Anuk Arudpragasam

Rave The Wall Street Journal Mr. Arudpragasam’s calibrated, carefully observed prose gives the novel, with all its tangents, its sense of perfect wholeness ... absorbing. So gracefully rendered are the long, balanced sentences that they envelop you—bring you to focused attention—without making a show of themselves. If there is a weakness, it is in the deployment of the book’s ideas, which are not so subtly conveyed ...The book takes a self-conscious and rather explanatory approach to evoking an experience defined by its absence of consciousness. This is a quibble—and I strongly recommend both of Mr. Arudpragasam’s novels—but it is the difference between excellence and the transcendence that this author is capable of producing.

Michael Punke

Rave Wall Street Journal In his short, spirited biography of Crazy Horse, Larry McMurtry pointed out that there are fewer verifiable facts about the Lakota war leader than there are about Alexander the Great, who lived some 2,000 years earlier ... from the beginning the warrior is presented as a man apart ... Ridgeline builds toward the skirmish that is sometimes called the Fetterman Fight, after Capt ... Mr. Punke makes him the mastermind behind the military strategy, the man with the insight and authority to impose tactical discipline on tribes accustomed to winning glory through individual feats of combat ... Like the Lakota fighters, the reader is eager for the waiting to end and the showdown to arrive. It eventually does, in a thrilling, gut-twisting series of sprung traps and harrowing violence—an action sequence that’s very much the stuff of legend.

Katie Kitamura

Mixed The Wall Street Journal ... searching and seriously considered—the glimpses into the protocol at the Court are highly intriguing—but the clean, blank surface of the prose inhibits deep engagement. The theme of ambiguity shades easily to vagueness, most notably in the encounters between the narrator and the accused war criminal, which ought to be climactic but instead feel uncertain.

Dana Spiotta

Mixed The Wall Street Journal It’s an appealing, cross-grained cast of characters and the writing—colloquial, sarcastic, a bit blowsy—is funny and down-to-earth. And yet ultimately the novel is a mess. At about the two-thirds mark, for reasons passing understanding, Ms. Spiotta introduces a sequence of histrionic non sequiturs that carry the once steadily absorbing family drama to a breathless, bathetic ending. The most egregious insertion is a police shooting, a plot twist that parasitizes current events in exactly the cheap way that Sam has come to decry. In these inexplicable final chapters, the novel’s protagonist seems wiser than her own creator.

Diane Johnson

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... thoroughly charming ... A delightful comedy of manners involving the entire extended family ensues, spiced up by an unlikely pregnancy. Even when the proceedings become a touch tawdry, there’s a blessed absence of American puritanism in their presentation. Ms. Johnson, now 87 years old, is the least scandalized of authors and she deals with sex and other secrets with an amused c’est comme ça attitude learned from her adopted country of France.

Emilio Fraia, trans. by Zoë Perry

Mixed The Wall Street Journal ... it shuffles through a selection of pointillist short stories and metafictions ... The fragmentary character of this allusive, mercurial book is such that, when you finish it, you have an assortment of eye-catching puzzle pieces but no clear sense of how they’re meant to go together.

Donal Ryan

Positive The Wall Street Journal Ryan writes conspicuously beautiful prose, and he is at his best when he blends the music of rural speech with fiddle-reels of natural description ... The storytelling need not be sentimentalized—Mr. Ryan’s books are usually quite dark—but it is inherently romantic, entrancingly so ... But it is to Mr. Ryan’s credit that he has continually sought to expand his reach ... brings out Mr. Ryan’s most sensuous and emotive writing. Scattered allusions to biblical tales reinforce the feeling that though its specifics are updated, the story in Strange Flowers is as old as civilization. In the final section, Joshua, troubled and misunderstood like his mother, repeats her rejection and flees to London. But the cords of family and place are stronger than distance for Mr. Ryan, and though this is his most expansive novel yet, it is still, at heart, about homecoming.

Susan Bernofsky

Mixed The Wall Street Journal Ms. Bernofsky wants to peer behind the smiling naïf to better glimpse the lonely, erratic artist beset by poverty and oppressed by failure who would spend the final 28 years of his life institutionalized, writing almost nothing at all ... For a figure as quirky as Walser, Clairvoyant of the Small can be surprisingly hidebound, dwelling mostly in dry historical records, but it improves in the final period of Walser’s life, when the archives thin out.

Joshua Cohen

Rave The Wall Street Journal Mr. Cohen has fictionalized the episode to brilliant effect, producing a novel that is in part a seriocomic portrayal of postwar American domesticity, in part an ideological origin story, and most of all a parable dramatizing the intra-tribal disputes that divided Jews in the wake of the Holocaust ... Mr. Cohen proves himself not just America’s most perceptive and imaginative Jewish novelist, but one of its best novelists full stop.

Samantha Silva

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... stirring and occasionally hagiographic episodes ... While the novel is decidedly an homage it is also a study of false steps and evolving ideas ... The confidences between the women are the most purely imagined in the novel and also the most moving, and they help us understand what another character means when he tells Mary, \'You make everyone’s world bigger.\'

Zakiya Dalila Harris

Mixed The Wall Street Journal Some of Ms. Harris’s office-place burlesques are straightforward and effective, especially those that portray the ways that the white corporate world’s purblind attempts to \'diversify\' result in tokenism and minstrelsy. The story’s intrigue ramps up as its bizarre supernatural element emerges (it involves a secret cabal and a means of mind control through which black women are brainwashed into tolerating everyday racism), but likewise its vision of society clarifies into something...bleak and predetermined ... For black women, authenticity has been banished to the underground and the only way to succeed in the world is to sell out.

Sam Riviere

Mixed The Wall Street Journal While the writing in Dead Souls contains playful puns and allusions, it is also loaded with vapid business jargon and pages of inconsequential \'microanalysis.\' The standout stylistic signature is the lack of paragraph breaks. Typically, this is a technique used to convey a stream of consciousness, but in this case we are not getting the narrator’s wandering thoughts but rather his summary of Wiese’s confession. Delivering it with no breaks or pauses makes him seem like a sociopath, or some kind of post-human android. His soul is the deadest of all ... Mr. Riviere’s clever but enervating novel, then, is an instance of the imitative fallacy writ large, a book that embodies the aspects of culture it deplores (Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts is another recent example in the trend). Poetry itself, Wiese admits, \'remains a continual possibility,\' a space of potential regeneration. Obviously, no poetry appears in the book.

Claire Fuller

Rave The Wall Street Journal With a textured, naturalistic writing style [...] Ms. Fuller weaves between ordinary village life and the Seeders’ shadowy family saga, which is marked by illicit love, violence and blood debts. The close attachment to Jeanie’s and Julius’s limited points of view enrich the suspense as long-kept secrets are gradually revealed. But even the disclosures and resolutions can’t entirely domesticate Unsettled Ground, which carries its lonely, stirring music of loss to the end.

Jim Shepard

Rave The Wall Street Journal The worry about the spate of coronavirus literature that is soon to bombard us is that it will be cheap and bathetic, but Phase Six sits at the opposite extreme, so densely researched and unemotional that it might have been written by committee at the CDC ... This is part of Mr. Shepard’s distinctive style, of course. The author is one of the great mimics of contemporary literature, capable of producing convincing, authoritative narratives on anything imaginable, from the Cuban baseball league to Polish Himalayan mountaineering to life in the Warsaw ghetto, to name just some of his past topics. Phase Six again demonstrates his detached, ironized mastery of a complex and highly technical subject. I wouldn’t recommend it to my worst enemy.

Will Leitch

Positive The Wall Street Journal The crime drama in How Lucky is, it has to be said, pretty ludicrous ... If you can overlook all that, however, you’ll find a touchingly imagined portrait of friendship and community ... The illness, violence and pathological hatreds that dominate our news feeds run throughout How Lucky, but Mr. Leitch is one of many novelists trying to bring to life the connections that persist despite them.

Kit Fan

Positive Wall Street Journal The narrator, nicknamed Buddha, is a recovered heroin addict who has been given shelter in a local convent, but though this naturally allies him with the nuns, he finds a second home in the streets, befriending a starlet-turned-prostitute and her fearless teenage daughter, who has been the mafia’s point person for the drug trade since she was a child ... The dark drama that unfolds is an elegy to that vanished vanishing world.

Virginie Despentes tr. Frank Wynne

Mixed The Wall Street Journal ... [a] kinetic translation ... The broadening of the trilogy’s themes, occasioned by its desire to encompass French current events, brings about qualities of haste and summarization. The first (and best) volume is extraordinary for its uncensored, hyperrealist character sketches of deadbeat Parisians of all stripes. Volume 3 is more of a political fable, an impression solidified by a weird and memorable coda that traces the afterlife of the \'Subutex sect\' across the coming centuries all the way to the \'twilight of the third millennium.\'

Rachel Cusk

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... the novel’s electric charge comes from the asymmetric relationship between L and M. L’s artistic genius is connected, like Satan’s, to his claims of absolute freedom ... He needs M and also needs to cast her as his nemesis. M, meanwhile, is desperate for a kind of transcendence by proxy, a view of life that is more potent than what she has found in her conventional roles as wife and mother, so she becomes an unstable co-conspirator in L’s program of humiliation and destruction ... a sharp feeling of estrangement is crucial to Ms. Cusk’s fictions. The writing, so heightened and epigrammatic, seems almost to mock the homespun fashions of traditional realist prose. Its beauties are glittering and mirrored in the way of razor wire: Artistic truth, in her books, is always a savage thing ... the voice here—loving, bitter, impassioned—is gripping in its volatility.

Deirdre McNamer

Positive The Wall Street Journal Rotating between the viewpoints of an eccentric cast...Ms. McNamer unfolds the mystery of the crime while developing a dark, at times comic, portrait of the \'final aloneness\' of old age. This is, on one level, an infuriating cautionary tale about the opportunities available to those willing to fleece aging Boomers ... Why should they fight back? But by the end of this underdog novel, Ms. McNamer has developed poignant reasons that they do.

Ann Quin

Rave The Wall Street Journal Quin’s writing was always dreamlike and fragmentary, but here she had gained the confidence to dispense with plot almost entirely, creating a heady effect with a dense brew of aphorisms, oracles and strands of prose poetry ... Quin’s spare prose line—Delphic, obscure and hauntingly suggestive—creates a comparably vertiginous kind of enchantment. To submit to this unique book’s spell is to experience, in language, a \'fantastic dance of images, shapes, forms.\'

Paul Theroux

Positive The Wall Street Journal As with his totemic travel writing, exotic settings and a flair for adventure invigorate the otherwise workmanlike prose, and the scenes flash with surfer’s lingo, snatches of Hawaiian pidgin and odes to the ocean ... True, the anecdotes can get a touch long-winded. There’s an extended section recalling Sharkey’s odd-couple friendship with a strung-out Hunter S. Thompson (aka the Duke of Puke) that was probably more enjoyable to write than it is to read. But what Mr. Theroux nicely captures are not just surfing tales but a surfer lifestyle dedicated to self-sufficient contentment, what Sharkey calls \'the economy of enough.\' Here is a book about losing happiness and the struggle demanded to recover it.

Chris Power

Positive The Wall Street Journal Patrick’s \'obliviousness\' makes Robert \'feel charged with potency, as if he had the other man under his control.\' Mr. Power allows him to dwell in that illusion for a long time, smoothly blending prosaic day-to-day events with Robert’s fictionalized renderings of Patrick’s disclosures. But gradually the \'le Carré stuff\' Robert saw merely as material presses in from the edges, and a story that seemed slightly thin and diffuse abruptly consolidates for a killer payoff ending.

Willy Vlautin

Rave The Wall Street Journal The pressures of poverty give the novel its vivid unpredictability, creating an almost constant temptation to lawlessness. Lynette feels speared on a paradox of the American Dream—realistically, in order to become a responsible homeowner and caretaker, she has to cheat and steal ... Mr. Vlautin has some trouble integrating his characters’ pasts into the narrative. Here it comes out in a number of unnaturally long-winded monologues. Nevertheless, The Night Always Comes is a taut, action-packed production with a memorable protagonist who never abandons her sense of moral truth amid the Darwinian scramble for cash.

Caleb Azumah Nelson

Positive The Wall Street Journal On one hand, then, Open Water is an exceptionally topical novel, its academic vocabulary (\'plunder,\' \'gaze,\' \'Black body\') and its intellectual referents—writer Zadie Smith, director Barry Jenkins, African-American studies scholar Saidiya Hartman—tying it closely to the political moment in ways that will reverberate deeply for some readers and, for others, simply convey information. But there is also something universal about the ragged vulnerability the love affair accesses in Mr. Nelson’s writing, and in his willingness to portray naked, often weepy, emotion. Everyone has experienced these things and yet in literary fiction scarcity has made them precious.

Dario Diofebi

Mixed The Wall Street Journal ... the surprise in this debut is that it’s power rather than money that drives the disparate cast of characters ... Through these loosely linked storylines, Mr. Diofebi, a former poker professional, aims to present a complete picture of Las Vegas in all its sprawl and chaos ... Dickensian ambitions, though it has more in common with slangy, hyperverbal David Foster Wallace-inspired doorstoppers that are sometimes affixed with the label \'hysterical realism.\' There aren’t scenes so much as onslaughts of information ... It’s a dizzying experience, full of noise and flashing lights and only infrequent brushes with believable human behavior. Extraordinary and dull gets it about right.

Giacomo Sartori

Positive The Wall Street Journal BUG is interested in the way personhood merges with technology ... The novel’s language is brainy and technical yet inflected by childhood naiveté, a high-wire act that translator Frederika Randall superbly conveys ... A Faustian bargain comes to the fore, as BUG’s camaraderie is really a power play for more processing capacity. Though its backdrop is dystopian, the novel is always on the side of erring humanity. Between BUG and the young narrator, only one has a conscience and an ability to love.

Kamel Daoud

Positive Wall Street Journal Zabor thinks that he possesses the power to save the lives of the dying by furiously writing stories about them ... Confidently translated from the French by Emma Ramadan, it is a somewhat frantic, rambling thing, allowing full vent to Zabor’s \'predilection for digressions.\' But if it lacks the compression of Mr. Daoud’s 2013 novel ...it is animated by the same zealous faith in the messianic potential of narrative.

Jhumpa Lahiri

Positive The Wall Street Journal The short novel is partitioned into brisk, fleeting chapters ... A subtle progression can be detected as the vignettes build to her decision to finally leave her city for a visiting position at a university elsewhere. But primarily this is a mood novel, in which the theme of alienation familiar from Ms. Lahiri’s earlier books has been both transformed and aestheticized ... The tough, clipped sentences, dry and flammable as tinder, impress the qualities of her self-enforced isolation upon us, both its orderly comforts and its weightless moments of terror ... The book’s sparse, fragmentary form informs its feeling of emotional starvation. Be warned, then, that although this is the same Jhumpa Lahiri so many have read and loved in the past, it is also someone who has translated herself into a new style, one that may initially chafe and perturb.

Jon Fosse

Positive Wall Street Journal The sum of the action is Asle’s trip to the city to drop off paintings with his gallerist and visit his namesake. Regularly the narration blends into his memories as a young man leaving home and taking up painting. A haunting sense of doubling recurs, not only with the second Asle but with a lost love named Ales who persists in a ghostly form in his work. What is even more palpable in this book is the way that the writing is meant to replicate the pulse and repetitive phrasing of liturgical prayer ... These unique books ask you to engage with the senses rather than the mind, and their aim is to bring about the momentary dissolution of the self.

Jakob Guanzon

Mixed The Wall Street Journal A novel of suspense that follows Henry’s attempt to hold things together for the interview in spite of the obstacles—illness, malnutrition, vagrancy laws, thieves, scammers and any of a thousand small, unforeseen expenses—that make every day a tightrope act ... Mr. Guanzon has also chosen to widen his story through lengthy interspersed flashbacks recounting Henry’s marriage, his fateful friendship with a small-time drug pusher and his struggles to rehabilitate after his prison term. The context fleshes out Henry’s active role in his poverty—he’s not simply a random victim of the system—but it seriously diffuses the tension of the scenes in the razor’s-edge present. The writing suffers in the shift from particularities to the kind of artsy, metaphor-laden exposition cultivated in creative-writing programs ... Ultimately, this promising first novel can feel curiously loose and profligate, as though it might have learned more from the punishing discipline that is all that separates Henry from disaster.

Kevin Brockmeier

Positive The Wall Street Journal His unique new collection...continues his quiet, wondering, taxonomic approach to envisioning the spirit world. Included are 100 quicksilver sketches ... These entries are too spacey and speculative to be read straight through; one ought to approach them in snatches, as with prose poems or philosophical pensées. Sometimes a phantom’s primary role seems to be to allow Mr. Brockmeier a flight of lyricism ... But always they offer a strange kind of comfort: Who could ever feel wholly alone in a universe as teeming as this one?

Blake Bailey

Mixed The Wall Street Journal It’s seemingly all here, every relationship, every affair, every tryst, from Roth’s days as a brash whiz kid out of Newark...to his Viagra-popping dotage as a literary Olympian. We learn of favored positions and accessories, styles of foreplay and dirty talk ... Mr. Bailey’s bird’s-eye style works best in depicting the whirlwind of Roth’s youth ... this all makes for glamorous reading, and there are sparkling scenes ... Roth had endured a terrible marriage to a young mother-of-two named Maggie Martinson. Mr. Bailey is excellent on this bitterly codependent relationship, which Roth’s inexperience endows with real pathos, despite his habitual philandering ... [Roth\'s] artistic journey, however, is obscured by Mr. Bailey’s clinical treatment of the books: he’s more inclined to explicate their real-life models than to speculate on their aesthetic intentions. But the bigger trouble is that Roth’s private life obtrudes once again in the form of another disastrous marriage, this time to the famous British actress Claire Bloom ... This section of the biography reads less like a rebuttal than the findings of a third-party arbitration in a divorce hearing, as Mr. Bailey goes through the weeds of every accusation, picking out inconsistencies ... Like a hangover headache, a certain sourness lingers throughout the rest of the biography, which snags constantly on Roth’s accumulating feuds ... perhaps [Roth] would be struck by the strange way that such a big, rigorously researched, consummately written biography can make a man look small.

Christine Smallwood

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... [an] excellent debut ... Its difficult heroine is Dorothy, an overqualified adjunct literature professor who is enduring the prolonged aftereffects of a miscarriage. The \'blight\' in her womb, as her doctor calls it, reminds her all too readily of her barren career prospects and of the imperiled future of life on Earth in general. It’s a powerful metaphor, if fairly on the nose, and there are moments when the ax-grinding in The Life of the Mind is too predictable. Ms. Smallwood’s streak of dry, dark humor does much to dispel any restlessness, however, and the vignettes include some superb glancing satires of academia and the psychiatric racket. But it’s the miscarriage, treated not as a literary device but as a fact in itself, that occasions the best passages ... In one breathtaking scene set during an OB-GYN appointment, Dorothy is mesmerized by a sonogram of her empty womb ... And a bracing penultimate chapter that takes a hard, ambivalent look at another kind of termination—a friend’s abortion—leaves the novel in an aptly unsettling place of \'nonconclusion.\'

Russell Banks

Rave The Wall Street Journal The mixture of bravado and vulnerability is characteristic of Mr. Banks’s impressive body of work, whose range has been underappreciated ... a gruff exterior covers an abyss of sentimentality ... This is a sensitive but dreary novel of valediction that pursues atonement without any apparent belief that such a thing is possible.

Minae Mizumura

Mixed The Wall Street Journal ... fascinating, but the trouble is obvious. The friction that results from imposing a dual-language text onto a story about choosing between languages has been lost in “An I-Novel.” In fact, the book’s untranslatability is a feature rather than a bug ... English-speakers are left out, since a bilingual book cannot be reproduced for monolingual societies. As translating failures go, then, this one is healthy and instructive ... Americans are prone to the complacent expectation that every book of worth will eventually be delivered to their doorsteps. It is good to be reminded that some experiences are closed to us unless we work for them.

Yaniv Iczkovits, trans. by Orr Schar

Positive The Wall Street Journal Israeli writer Yaniv Iczkovits’s debut The Slaughterman’s Daughter approaches history in a fabulist style reminiscent of Sholem Aleichem and his disciples ... The folktale tradition evoked in the storytelling has an estimable history, but perhaps even more old-fashioned is this novel’s length and leisurely tempo. Mr. Iczkovits slowly elaborates his scenes, indulging in every tangent and scrap of context, as though there weren’t countless forms of instant entertainment vying for the reader’s attention. (One interlude about Zizek’s exploits in the army is as long as a stand-alone novella.) I appreciated the pace, even if it sometimes made me antsy. Today it would be a quick drive to Minsk; once upon a time the trip was the stuff of epics.

Jack Livings

Mixed The Wall Street Journal Though the book is written in the first person, it freely enters the thoughts of a roving cast of characters ... But even with the steady disclosure of secrets—some of them quite moving—I found it difficult to gain a foothold on this book. The wide spread of characters has a whiteout effect, and a snowdrift of newsy period details—the gas crisis, looming problems in Iran—are blandly generalizing. Mr. Livings tends to use skill and suaveness as placeholders for style. Personal memory, I couldn’t help but feel, should be more idiosyncratic.

Maria Stepanova tr. Sasha Dugdale

Rave Wall Street Journal The hybrid book that Ms. Stepanova has finally produced presents gleanings from her family archives alongside the labyrinthine narrative of her \'search for the past,\' which she concedes is incomplete and in many ways unsuccessful. And amidst the personal artifacts are essay-like meditations on the tensions that inhere within any act of remembrance. The result is a rich, digressive, deeply introspective work ... \'There is too much past, and everyone knows it,\' she writes at a moment of sharpened despair. The surplus means that memories are necessarily invidious and sorted into two sets, \'the interesting and the less interesting,\' those \'fit for retelling and those . . . only fit for oblivion.\' A fanatical, itemizing approach to history can help overcome prejudice, but even the most straightforward documentary material becomes distorted across time ... You can sense the decades of contemplation Ms. Stepanova has dedicated to these questions in the sparkle and density of her prose, which Sasha Dugdale has carried into English so naturally that it’s possible to forget you are reading a translation. This is an erudite, challenging book, but also fundamentally a humble one, as it recognizes that a force works on even the most cherished family possessions that no amount of devotion can gainsay.

Carys Davies

Positive The Wall Street Journal Byrd is woven into the conflict, but in a complicated way, since Ms. Davies is eager not to fit him into the colonial-era role of the white savior. The Mission House is a careful, quiet, skillful drama of well-meant misunderstandings and cultural divisions. The interactions are polite and repressed, but the story is galvanized by the \'passion simmering under the surface of things. Always, every once in a while, the lid blowing off, and nothing, it seemed, that anyone could do to stop it happening.\'

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Positive The Wall Street Journal [Vo Danh\'s] roiling, pox-on-both-their-houses cynicism often comes across like bits from a stand-up comedy routine ... The funny, excoriating voice delivering these observations has lost none of its energy since The Sympathizer. What has changed is the balance between action and ideas. The plot of The Committed, which mostly dwells on Vo Danh’s misadventures with the mafia, has no specific grounding in historical events and often seems incidental to its protagonist’s intellectual evolution. Postcolonial and critical race theories exist in the underpinnings of The Sympathizer; now they have come to the surface, sometimes in ham-handed ways ... The biting back and forth of this double-edged novel remains a thrill and a provocation, but there are aspects of The Committed that seem written for the Academy.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... another uncertain meeting between the horrifying and the heartwarming ... Only the restraint of the prose guards the scenes that elaborate her ingenuous belief system against becoming altogether cloying ... The dystopian side of things is familiar in the novel today. What is surprising, and even uncomfortable, about Klara and the Sun is how much Mr. Ishiguro wants to emphasize and honor the persistence of kindness amid it all. The story focuses on Josie’s battle with her illness and the friends and family who, with Klara, rally around her. As though overcorrecting after the dark response to Never Let Me Go, Mr. Ishiguro closes with a Hallmark-movie deus ex machina and a load of sentimental pabulum about \'real and everlasting\' love ... Is this a work of dogged hopefulness or subversive nihilism? Is Klara a paragon of fidelity or a tool of suppression? Are we meant to admire her or be disturbed by her uncanny reproduction of admirable behavior? Maybe the only thing we can take away for sure from this crafty and troubling book is the realization that the dichotomy between these either/or readings must be a false one. Nobody can be just one thing, either an optimist or a pessimist. The complexity of experience all but guarantees that everyone will be involved in goodness and evil simultaneously. That is the foundational paradox that, in Mr. Ishiguro’s work, ceases to be paradoxical and becomes simply defining—both of humankind and of the strange creations it models in its image.

Anakana Schofield

Positive The Wall Street Journal These scattered lines of thought, which Ms. Schofield sometimes arranges like verses of prose poetry, compress a remarkable amount of humor, anger and sadness ... The novel holds out no consolation except the vigor of its telling. If she has nothing else, Bina has had her say.

Vendela Vida

Mixed The Wall Street Journal Ms. Vida’s novel doesn’t generate much suspense from its lies—the plot, so reliant on adult gullibility, is pretty hard to believe. But it’s insightful about the ways that girls of a certain age feel pressured to let their imaginations run wild.

Melanie Finn

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... involving, morally complex ... Ms. Finn is a sensitive observer of Rosie’s circumstances and the depictions of poverty, in particular, are real and omnipresent, yet they’re never essentializing. Rosie is a difficult character, full of anger, generosity and self-doubt, and her muddle is the stuff of true tragedy.

Andre Gide

Rave Wall Street Journal That he was writing to entertain there is no doubt, and as a satire of the self-important aesthete the book is witty and frequently hilarious ... this sarcastic ode to stagnation is foremost a comedy of ideas, a superb example of the genre the Hungarian author Antal Szerb dubbed \'neo-frivolity.\' The translator Damion Searls has kept the language jokey and loose, emphasizing the mood of casual absurdity.

Sarah Moss

Mixed The Wall Street Journal The chapters jump among their points of view, taking the form of close third-person internal monologues ... Mixed among these chapters are quick, ominous meditations on the surrounding environment—glimpses of the animals threatened by the downpour, or of the ancient bark canoes and skin coracles corroding on the lake bottom. The juxtapositions are simple but effective: intertwined with the pedestrian concerns that occupy the characters’ minds are the elemental dramas of death and survival ... In Summerwater the aura of menace comes not only from the biblical weather but the mounting anger against a cottage of foreigners who blast their music all night. The chapters build a superb sense of foreboding that is ultimately deflated in the oblique, mostly incoherent final scene. Ms. Moss is masterly with loomings and premonitions, but she loses her nerve when the confrontations arrive.

Madeleine Watts

Mixed The Wall Street Journal Throughout this blighted coming-of-age story, Ms. Watts seeds curious capsule histories about Australia’s earliest colonizers and their disappointed dreams of finding an Eden-like oasis at the heart of the barren continent. One comes to look forward to these tangents, not only because they are odd and evocative but because they impose some variety upon the narrative. Ms. Watts writes with unquestionable poise and intelligence, but the tone of the writing is uniformly flat and too little happens in the scenes themselves to create any ripples.

Peter Ho Davies

Mixed The Wall Street Journal ...the self-flagellation is so intense and unremitting that the book quickly comes to feel like a purely therapeutic exercise ... What matters isn’t the technicality of \'truth\' but the impression conveyed to the reader, and the overwhelming sense here is that this is not a work of literature, in which experience has been transmuted by language and reflection, but the unmediated confessions of a troubled stranger ... Mr. Davies is a good writer...but the wounds he exposes in this work are so raw and open that the only proper response for those who don’t know him personally is sorrowful silence.

Paraic O'Donnell

Positive The Wall Street Journal The novel tracks...intersecting paths to the truth, building suspense until the dramatic payoff. There’s good fun in the investigations ... There’s also some genre silliness ... One slightly ticklish issue is that the supernatural elements of The House on Vesper Sands are remarkably similar to those in David Mitchell’s recent fantasy novels ... Yet such concerns become quibbles once you’re ensconced in the rich, Gothic embellishments of Mr. O’Donnell’s prose ... The House on Vesper Sands performs a...kind of enchantment, transforming a chronicle of sordid crimes into an enjoyably eerie ghost story.

Ge Fei

Rave The Wall Street Journal The novel, the first volume of Mr. Ge’s Jiangnan Trilogy, takes place at the start of the 20th century during the lawless final years of the Qing Dynasty, and although the Xinhai Revolution and the establishment of the Republic of China provide it backdrop, this sinuous, captivating epic is less interested in textbook history than in the madness and illusions that underwrite it ... Peach Blossom Paradise—it was originally published in 2004—has the crowded cast, the close attention to setting and the dramatic twists of traditional historical fiction, yet its fixation with dreams, disguises and delusions gives it the feeling of an otherworldly fable ... the narrative sustains its mysterious atmosphere by occupying the points of view of children.

Breece D'j Pancake

Rave Wall Street Journal Pancake possessed a hard-earned authority on various facets of West Virginia life, including \'doghole mining, long-distance trucking, Holiness congregations, serpent handling,\' to which you could add boxing competitions, tugboat operating, fox hunting and farming. The depictions are unsentimental and often brutal, sharpened by regret and a desperate longing for escape. But the harshness is conveyed with a level of intensity and clairvoyance that we associate with adoration—and indeed, conflicted love is at the heart of each of these stories ... Pancake was an extraordinarily tactile writer. The naked emotions he summons are tangible in the rhythms of his sentences, the heavy, vibratory cadences that you can feel beneath your skin ... While Pancake could be humorous—the apostrophe between the middle initials of his name was a wry joke, adopted from a printer’s error at the Atlantic—these are in general earnest, serious stories, preoccupied with purity and evil. They are a young man’s stories, in other words, and it is impossible not to feel the loss of the work he would have created as he both mellowed and grew more confident ... these stories survive him, heartbreaking not for their potential but their perfection.

Jane Smiley

Rave The Wall Street Journal With a degree of savviness that would impress even the most experienced product management consultant, Jane Smiley has combined two foolproof genres of escapist fiction for her latest book, Perestroika in Paris: the Parisian fairy tale and the equestrian novel ... I like that Ms. Smiley has leaned into the fantasy, hiding Paras not in some random greenspace hugging the Périphérique but in the Champ de Mars, the crowded park in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower ... Ms. Smiley places herself in the consciousness of her characters, imagining the various ways that each creature perceives the world, but the feel-good charm of her novel flows from the fact that they are all able to understand each other, creating a species-crossing conspiracy of kindness.

Eley Williams

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... entertaining ... While bringing the storylines to a convergence, Ms. Williams indulges in delightful digressions ... Underneath this novel’s extremely bookish mystery is the idea that our identities are as improvisatory as the words we affix to them, and that even the dictionary, the most seemingly staid and impartial arbiter of truth, is an \'unreliable narrator.\'

Phillip Lopate

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... another enormous, endlessly fortifying mixture of famous works and neglected gems that can take pride of place on anyone’s bedside table for months before its pleasures come close to being exhausted ... Juxtaposition is one consequence of variety, and it’s delightful to find Albert Einstein nipping at the heels of James Thurber, or Norman Mailer and Rachel Carson writing from the same year (1955) but in wildly different registers.

Sigrid Undset, trans. By Tiina Nunnally

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... a captivating new translation ... This is an absorbing, psychologically rich tale that promises to grow deeper and more memorable in each successive volume.

Charles Baxter

Positive The Wall Street Journal Mr. Baxter continues to chip away at the myth of the Midwest’s innocence, probing the anarchy and fear that gape beneath the mown lawns and mini-malls ... The Sun Collective wobbles between the prosaic and the suburban ... the likeness that occurred to me is with Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, where the underlying chaos is both concealed and somehow deepened by the inviting, mannerly prose. While Mr. Baxter is not as formally daring as Mr. Ishiguro, he possesses many of the same insights, not least about the mysteries of old age.

Jonas Lüscher, tr. Tess Lewis

Mixed The Wall Street Journal ... slow going in comparison [to Lüscher\'s previous book], as most of the action involves a washed-up professor trying to overcome writer’s block. The humor tends to be extremely specialized, such as Kraft’s stinging barbs about the \'inadequate intellect\' of former chancellor Helmut Kohl. These jokes will land with the right readers. I readily admit that my own intellect was inadequate to appreciate them.

Danielle Evans

Positive The Wall Street Journal This is a topical conflict and the stories perceptively touch on current controversies like cancel culture and the disputes over historical monuments. But these are, first and foremost, character-driven stories, and the arguments play out most forcefully in the minds of the young black women searching for some livable balance between guilt and forgiveness. As such, the stories are expository rather than dramatic—that is, they tell more than they show. This works for Ms. Evans because her writing is remarkably fast, conveying information and moving across time periods with a velocity that can induce whiplash ... Ms. Evans is also funny in a droll, puncturing way, as inclined to mine trauma for mordant humor as for sentimentality.

Kevin Barry

Rave The Wall Street Journal Easygoing in their elegance and capacious in their emotional range, these stories draw naturally from Ireland’s literary tradition without becoming distorted by nostalgia or homage ... in these stories the environment is uncannily responsive to the mood of the scene, a mysterious intelligence of its own ... In these splendid stories, Mr. Barry portrays the two opposing faces of passion.

Meredith Hall

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... what impresses most is the patient, unforced manner with which she delineates her story of tragedy and gradual renewal. Naturally and ineluctably, like a river finding its way to the sea, the characters drift into lives that are unrecognizable from what they intended for themselves ... the counterweight to the grief that besets Beneficence is the profound satisfaction the Senters take from their daily labor on their land. This is also a finely observed novel of chores and routines and seasons, and of the sense of agency that can be reclaimed through the \'covenant\' of work. As organically as it traveled to heartbreak, Beneficence progresses to the place of wisdom that lies beyond it, where we learn that a home is part of the \'vast world of innocence and harm,\' not an island beyond it.

Nicole Krauss

Mixed The Wall Street Journal Ironically, the problem is that these leaps into unreason can feel formulaic. Adultery and natural disasters are freighted with overt symbolic meanings that tend to lessen the insecurity they’re intended to produce. Is there anything more difficult for a skilled, sensible writer than to reinvent herself? Ms. Krauss isn’t quite there yet, but it’s well worth following her journey.

Wolfgang Koeppen, trans. Michael Hofmann

Rave The Wall Street Journal Given a rousing translation by Michael Hofmann, Wolfgang Koeppen’s 1951 novel Pigeons on the Grass now appears in English. This modernist homage—the title draws on a line from Gertrude Stein—takes place in a single day in postwar Munich, stitching together the wanderings of various down-at-heel Germans, as well as their American occupiers ... In Heinrich Böll’s postwar German classic Billiards at Half-Past Nine, a guilt-plagued architect envisions \'a monument of dust and rubble.\' Pigeons on the Grass is this kind of monument.

Don Delillo

Mixed The Wall Street Journal The Silence is about the glimpse—the abrupt, jarring semi-premonition—of a post-technological void ... This all sounds fairly timely and will no doubt burnish Mr. DeLillo’s reputation as an oracle dispassionately communicating the news from the future ... Judged on the basis of topicality, The Silence is less than a trifle. It doesn’t take a guru, after all, to tell us that we’re addicted to our devices. But there is another DeLillo that I have learned to take pleasure in, and that is DeLillo the ironist, the jokester, the sideline observer who delights in, rather than despairs over, the absurdities of modern experience. Behind its deadpan delivery, The Silence abounds in silliness ... The field of language is the real setting of The Silence, and for all the talk of Mr. DeLillo’s contemporary relevance, it’s notable that the book of his it most recalls is End Zone ... If The Silence turns out to be Mr. DeLillo’s final book, he ends having imagined a space for re-creation.

William Souder

Mixed The Wall Street Journal On one hand Mad at the World is condensed, clear and readable. (Mr. Souder’s previous books include brisk lives of Rachel Carson and John James Audubon.) But it achieves its relative brevity by omitting excerpts from Steinbeck’s journals and letters. What remains are the gloomy externalities of divorce and depression, which inform Mr. Souder’s argument that anger was the animating force behind Steinbeck’s art. There’s a lot to this, and certainly the bitterness toward domestic life in later works like East of Eden and The Winter of Our Discontent is hard to miss. But I’m more persuaded by Mr. Benson’s claim that Steinbeck holds our attention because \'he was a lover of life, rather than a hater of life.\'

Phil Klay

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... a crowded and vital cast of characters whose conflicts illuminate Colombia’s anarchic, decades-long civil war and the ugly compromises required by the peace treaty between the government and the FARC rebel group. But Missionaries is much more than a regional drama: This is a sweeping, interconnected novel of ideas in the tradition of Joseph Conrad and Norman Mailer that seeks to explicate the way war is waged in the American 21st century—and, in the process, to disabuse readers of their faith in anachronistic concepts like \'winning\' and \'losing\' ...So much complex information appears in Missionaries that Juan Pablo is forced to act as something of an explainer for the general reader, yet he’s so urbane and eloquent that he rarely becomes didactic. In general, the Colombian characters are rich and complicated ... By taking a long view of the \'rational insanity\' of global warfare, Missionaries brilliantly fills one of the largest gaps in contemporary literature.

Rumaan Alam

Mixed The Wall Street Journal ... the latest entry in that strangely popular form of middle-brow escapism, the apocalypse novel ... In essence this is good schlock horror—think Stephen King’s The Mist with much better writing ... it nibbles at Zeitgeist subjects like race relations and conspicuous consumption ... This makes the novel vividly relatable to the NPR listeners who are most likely to read it. It’s a shrewd move, to caution against late-capitalist decadence while partaking in it.

Shalom Auslander

Mixed The Wall Street Journal ... splenetic riffs on the ingrained human need to search for meaning in ancient customs, no matter how repugnant they are ... The jokes are dependably good ... If Mother for Dinner tickled me less than Hope: A Tragedy it’s partly because its scenes are so physically revolting ... I’m not sure if this will offend pieties or just turn stomachs.

Susanna Clarke

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... bewitching ... winks at the great quest epics organized around the hunt for some lost ancient power. It is also what you might think of as an academic thriller in the vein of Umberto Eco or Dan Brown ... because Ms. Clarke’s novel assumes Piranesi’s point of view—the narrative is related by way of his journal entries—these standard plot elements appear blurry and distorted, as though refracted through water. The happy reversal in this novel is that the genre conventions pitting power-mad villains against crusading good guys are entirely foreign to Piranesi, and for much of the novel beyond his comprehension ... a high-quality page-turner—even the most leisurely reader will probably finish it off in a day—but its chief pleasure is immersion in its strange and uncannily attractive setting ... Ms. Clarke is a cool and meticulous stylist—Piranesi’s journal entries about the House are loaded with measurements and calculations and painstaking architectural descriptions—but the territory she evokes transcends rationality ... Establishing that sense of totality—and the feeling of peacefulness that accompanies it—is Ms. Clarke’s standout feat ... The rub, however, is that Piranesi is mistaken, as there are gaps both in his memory and in his conception of the House. As the anthropologists’ skulduggery intrudes on the well-being of the House, the book merges with another literary genre: the puzzle novel, whereby Piranesi pieces together clues—some buried in his early journals, some from pages that have been torn up and woven by seagulls into their nests—to uncover the Other’s true identity, as well as his own. This is neatly done, and it will keep you reading, but it does shift the focus of the book away from its capacious worldbuilding to the practical mechanics of its plot. The trouble with the puzzle novel is that the story becomes so concerned with its solution that it ceases to pay attention to the image it reveals ... It is probably inescapable that Piranesi should undergo a disenchantment of a kind, and that the captivating mystery of its setting pass into a generic mystery in which the point is to figure out what has happened and learn how things will end. But as the ending unfolded, I admit that I was wistful for those earlier passages when Piranesi was still innocent of the complicated novel being constructed around him, serene in the belief that nothing other than his House was real.

Philippe Djian, trans. by Mark Polizzotti

Mixed The Wall Street Journal Mr. Djian lays out his brief novel of bad habits, betrayals and unrivaled family dysfunction in a starved, detached manner that echoes elements of American minimalism. The characters’ emotions are raw but the writing is flat, laconic and almost pathologically suppressed, as though the syntax itself had suffered some kind of trauma. Mr. Djian’s feat is to tell a story of such dramatic disintegration with so few pen strokes ... Yet something is off about this book. The scenes are mostly rendered in elliptical dialogue, so it’s awkward to run up against lines like \'He’d bet his bottom dollar on it\' or \'You think you can just waltz in and screw up twenty years of marriage. Give me a break, not in your wildest dreams.\' The idioms are wrong; it’s impossible to imagine Iraq War veterans speaking this way. Mark Polizzotti is one of the best French translators working, but Mr. Djian’s imitation of American stylists may have posed an insuperable obstacle—sometimes Marlene reads as though Hemingway had been translated into French and then back into English. The catch with the novel of few words is that they have to be the right ones.

Marilynne Robinson

Rave The Wall Street Journal In its simplest sense, Jack is about salvation, though of a more earthly kind than that theorized by the Gilead elders. Even so, the obstacles are as daunting as any pilgrim’s progress ... her fiction is transcendent in its compassion and generous subjectivities. Ms. Robinson eschews absolutes not only with those gaps and silences in her storytelling but on the more intimate level of the sentence. I have never read another writer for whom qualifiers were such constant companions ... her series is so big and rich and open-ended that it is impervious to closure. These novels honor creation by affording us something we only occasionally find in the vastness of existence: a glimpse of eternity, such as it is.

Sigrid Nunez

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... conducts a meditative, closely observed exploration of the quotidian aspects of a life in the shadow of its annihilation ... Ms. Nunez possesses a flaneurial intellect; she strolls with ease between homespun personal anecdotes and musings on the writings of Kafka and Simone Weil. There is a mood of matter-of-factness to this book that feels both wise and unsettling. To live frankly in the time of \'too late\' is to cross beyond despair and back into the world of the everyday. This book’s quiet discovery is that, no matter how extreme the circumstances, \'life must be dealt with.\'

Walter Mosley

Positive The Wall Street Journal Mr. Mosley is a famous crime writer, but this collection is nearer to the recent work of Julian Barnes and Roddy Doyle, compiling vignettes and character sketches about lonely men undergoing the bewilderments of aging. In practiced, plainspoken prose, he presents a gallery of old men facing divorce, illness or perhaps some more unnamable crisis of existence ... The humble stories befit their soft-spoken antiheroes ... The collection’s representative character may be Michael Trey, who becomes a viral internet sensation by refusing to leave his apartment. This is passive resistance at its most extreme, seemingly the one recourse available to the book’s sympathetic catalog of outcasts.

Hari Kunzru

Positive The Wall Street Journal \"...an absorbing parable of contemporary paranoia ... Mr. Kunzru has always paired his sharp, elegant prose with visions of pandemonium, and in novels like Transmission (2004) and Gods Without Men (2011) the chaos is reflected in the deconstruction of the narrative—it is hard to follow what happens at the end of these books. But in Red Pill Mr. Kunzru concludes with a strictly realistic blow-by-blow of the 2016 presidential election. Current events, he suggests, illustrate the madness of the world more effectively than any literary device. Readers will decide for themselves whether this is farseeing or another instance of hysteria.\

Bob Blaisdell

Positive The Wall Street Journal ...[an] entertaining micro-biography ...The book is a chronicle of distractions and peevish excuses that also shows how the consuming labor of procrastination became a crucial part of the novel’s texture ... Tolstoy’s endless side projects seem at first like nuisances deterring him from the single-minded production of art, yet it’s in the daily minutia, and the passionate convictions his characters could inject into it, that we find his great novel’s soul.

Adam Wilson

Positive The Wall Street Journal A loose-fitting plot ... The manic, rapid-fire chapters, switching among a large cast of intersecting characters, from police to protesters to entrepreneurs, are confusing to keep up with, but they give Mr. Wilson the freedom to embark on a range of cultural digressions. Sensation Machines reads a little bit like Tom Wolfe in a futurist dystopia. There are full-throated riffs on materialism and tech surveillance, on simulation video gaming, white privilege and the lyrics of Eminem. A spirit of exhilaration fires the book’s best moments. We may be going to hell, but at least it’s fun to rant about.

Yaa Gyasi

Rave The Wall Street Journal Ms. Gyasi has trained her ambitions inward, applying the same rigorous attention to the quality of her sentences and to the laser-like interrogation of her themes. She has produced a powerful, wholly unsentimental novel about family love, loss, belonging and belief that is more focused but just as daring as its predecessor, and to my mind even more successful ... The narrative of difficult, immigrant striving is derailed by a slow-motion tragedy ... Unlike many novels centered on suffering, Ms. Gyasi’s book is not interested in eliciting sympathy or activating the reader’s guilt. It is, instead, burningly dedicated to the question of meaning ... confidently shuttles between the poles of faith and science—it quotes the Bible as fluently as it discusses neural circuits in the medial prefrontal cortex—plumbing each for comforts and insights but also dispassionately studying the ways that each falls short ... a hard, beautiful, diamantine luster.

Matthew Baker

Positive The Wall Street Journal Each story is smart and capably written, and each strives, with mixed success, to look beyond the gimmick of its premise to study the human cost of ideological perfection. If the collection were to carry a warning it would say: Be careful what you wish for.

Peter Cameron

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... pure Gothic horror, filled with phantoms and demons and other avatars of the uncanny ... Mr. Cameron’s ability to flicker between the eerie and the grubbily banal defines his fascinating recent project of revising classic literary genres ... The novel’s indeterminacy is both intriguing and moving, because it means that one character’s loss is another’s consummation, and an unbroken night is both a source of terror and the condition of a long-desired resting place,

Charlotte McConaghy

Positive The Wall Street Journal Franny’s woes, revealed in staggered flashbacks, are so extensive and extravagant that they begin to be slightly funny. But a bit of melodrama is permissible in a good nautical adventure, and Migrations moves at a fast, exciting clip, motored as much by love for \'creatures that aren’t human\' as by outrage at their destruction.

Aimee Bender

Positive The Wall Street Journal These recovered memories make up most of the book, and Ms. Bender depicts them in a clear and gentle light, their details precise but never threatening. There is a resemblance to Haruki Murakami in the brushing of the fantastic against the ordinary, but in The Butterfly Lampshade the intersection isn’t sinister, or even especially revelatory. Ms. Bender is interested in the integrity of private mysteries, and her wise, perceptive novel calmly insists that reality is not a fixed place but a journey that everyone travels by different routes.

Arlene Heyman

Positive The Wall Street Journal As in her vivacious 2016 story collection Scary Old Sex, Ms. Heyman writes with mature, unembarrassed frankness about attraction and lovemaking. Nor does she neglect the ravages the flesh is heir to—the novel’s most difficult scenes detail a stillbirth and a rape ... But even if Lottie’s story is partly an account of scars and stretch marks, the tone of Artifact is celebratory, an homage to the body’s capacity to impart amazement even after death.

Jim Carrey

Mixed The Wall Street Journal Having presumably left the writing part of this project to the capable Mr. Vachon, Mr. Carrey affects a tone of jaded contempt for the Hollywood star system. And while he pokes fun at the narcissistic, mystically inclined habits of coddled movie stars, the gibes double as zany gossip about his celebrity buddies ... The nifty thing about Mr. Carrey’s caricatures is that they simultaneously serve as self-promotion. The story ends with Carrey and other stars battling an alien invasion, an antic, hammy finale that points up the book’s essential silliness while also highlighting the fact that, in Mr. Carrey’s mind, his career misfortunes and Armageddon are inextricably connected. This novel is harmless fun, but it’s still more press release than satire.

Yiyun Li

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... a nostalgic, even rather fond, view of the lusty womanizers of yesteryear ... The novel moves between the illicit excitement of Lilia’s assignations and her heartbreak over Lucy’s death, and Ms. Li wisely refuses to contrive any resolution between the two moods. Lilia is grief-stricken yet resolutely without regrets, and the seeming contradiction informs her unforgettably ornery and impolitic view of the world. Must I Go is most bracing in its refusal to apologize for its follies, to perform any acts of literary penance.

Virginie Despentes, Trans. by Frank Wynne

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... a bona fide magnum opus ... A master of the free indirect style, Ms. Despentes inhabits the minds of a diverse cast of characters while doing for Paris what Joyce did for Dublin ... While Ms. Despentes can be a savage observer of that world, she’s also capable of creating moments of surpassing vulnerability. Yet the quality that struck this reader most forcibly is her freedom of thought. She simply does not care about political niceties, which allows her to extend imaginatively—though always unsparingly—into the lives of the losers, abusers, outcasts and reactionaries who brush shoulders on the Métro every morning. In contrast to the cautious moralizing of so much American fiction, Ms. Despentes’s teeming feat of negative capability is all the more exhilarating.

Daphne Merkin

Positive The Wall Street Journal Howard is lewd, manipulative, commanding and voraciously horny, and his dirty talk...verges on parody ... In a way Ms. Merkin’s novel is casting back to an earlier era of feminism that prioritized sexual satisfaction, recalling not only the frank carnality of Updike and Roth but also of Erica Jong and Lisa Alther. There are a few ambivalent nods to present-day mores—Judith recognizes that Howard is inappropriate and possibly dangerous. But Ms. Merkin is more inclined to take her antihero down a peg by showing him to be essentially childlike, no more in control of his sexual appetite than a teenager ... This is a study of sex as a great and terrible adventure, a bad decision that Judith will think longingly about for years to come.

Lynn Steger Strong

Positive The Wall Street Journal Ms. Strong’s prose articulates the narrator’s relentless day-to-day routine: quick, direct sentences packed into short, granulated scenes that lack the usual buffers of exposition or transitions ... The story, being rushed, is somewhat unformed, touching on the various compromises the narrator makes to once-cherished ideals for the sake of pragmatism and subsistence. But Want isn’t without hope or insights, and in the extremity of her exhaustion, the narrator has moments of sharp, delirious clarity.

Tara June Winch

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... wily, appealing ... While there is no shortage of darkness in The Yield, both in August’s life and in the history of Massacre Plains (which has its name for a reason), the writing is disarmingly chatty and casual, almost familial in its confidences. Most readers will be cheering on the characters by the time of the somewhat tidy resolution. Australia’s past may be stained with blood—or guwany, in the native tongue—but that also means that it once pulsed with a living tradition.

Brit Bennett

Positive The Wall Street Journal Though the plot revolves upon a series of canned recognition scenes, the underlying interest is in the cousins’ attempts to forge a livable combination of self-knowledge and self-invention ... Ms. Bennett’s second novel, but she marches through it with the professional assurance of an author with a dozen books under her belt. Such poise is an ambiguous blessing. Streamlined for readability, the writing can be generic, and in the motif of twins with contrasting fortunes (by now a cliché in literary fiction) it’s hard to avoid reductive symbolism ... The novel finds itself in the later chapters with Kennedy and Jude, where it allows its headliner themes to drift into the background of, and become complicated by, the flow of the cousins’ daily lives. My hope is that the warranted praise Ms. Bennett receives for this novel will have less to do with her efficient handling of timely, or \'relevant,\' subject matter than for her insights into the mysterious compound of what we call truth: a mixture of the identities we’re born with and those we create.

Dola de Jong, Trans. by Kristen Gehrman

Positive The Wall Street Journal The novel presents a fine study in unreliable narration, as it takes time to discern the desperate emotions screened behind Bea’s plain, dispassionate storytelling ... a careful and muted lament about the sorrow of restraint, and what moves the reader is not only Erica’s fate but Bea’s belated interrogation of \'the haunting question as to why I imposed certain restrictions on our relationship [that were] the legacy of the time, a legacy that has nestled into my tissue like a tumor.\'

Marie-Helene Bertino

Positive The Wall Street Journal The fantastic infiltrates the story in overtly metaphoric ways...But Ms. Bertino establishes a rationale for the madness beyond matrimonial jitters ... Like most trauma fiction, Parakeet becomes narrowly preoccupied by a single, all-defining moment that somehow both reconfigures the past and sets the course for the future ... But unlike most books in the genre, the novel isn’t lugubrious, instead steering into the experience of absurdity with a recklessness that keeps you guessing.

Kate Zambreno

Pan The Wall Street Journal We are, of course, in that new-found land called autofiction, but Drifts is different in a crucial way from such celebrated examples of the genre as Rachel Cusk’s Outline or Ben Lerner’s 10:04. However much those books blur into memoir, they are stylized and arranged so as to give them literary autonomy. One can just read them, knowing nothing of their authors. This isn’t so with Ms. Zambreno’s \'nervous and diaristic text,\' whose sketchy, unfinished nature emphasizes the faltering process rather than the end product. It can only be appreciated as an accessory to Ms. Zambreno’s larger and ongoing public performance of being a writer...This accounts for its overwhelming mood of ambivalence. A book that drifts, that never arrives at a vision or resolves upon a point of view, that is simply a journal of the various and contradictory things that a person feels and does from day to day, is fated to spend its time waffling over countless artistic dilemmas...but of the writing, which sometimes seeks to be fragmentary and poetic and at other times is confessional and expulsive, dispatched in hurried summaries ... The nullifying force of self-actualization lies behind these inconsistencies. If the author’s struggle counts for more than what she actually writes, distinctions of quality are flattened into irrelevance—and by extension, reading the book becomes a bizarrely passive experience, virtually the same as not having read it. Ms. Zambreno may like the idea of eschewing \'salable physical objects\'—of writing as a means of purely private expression—but Drifts has a bar code on it, nevertheless. Ambivalence is human, as are confusion, tedium and failure. But art is more than a transcription of life, thank God, or else we’d have no need for it.

Christopher Beha

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... with impressive craft Mr. Beha arranges their individual collapses into a chain of toppling dominos ... In his 2012 debut, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, Mr. Beha struggled to work out a private quarrel with postmodernism and narrative irony, but in this novel he has confidently embraced a style of traditional realism. What is striking is the absence of satire or polemic. Mr. Beha never exaggerates the tawdriness of his characters, and the sympathetic portrayals are all the more damning because they make their transgressions seem inherent to the environment rather than the aberrations of a particularly nasty class of people. Realism is in fact the costume he has patiently designed to disguise a vision of fallen humanity ... The only irony in this absorbing and satisfying novel is the cosmic kind. There is a force operating on their lives that eludes analysis and that can only be glimpsed once it’s too late to escape.

Charlie Kaufman

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... absolutely nothing in this baggy, voluminous debut novel is succinct—but it takes a similarly jaundiced attitude toward questions of free will, cultural manipulation and the possibility of independent thought and creation ... The humor in Antkind is as broad as the novel is long ... Mr. Kaufman’s method is to introduce a farcical non sequitur and then to retcon it into a semblance of a narrative ... The book’s shifting parameters of reality make this possible—or, rather, they cancel out the concept of a meaningful narrative. Mr. Kaufman is obsessed with the flaws in consciousness: the ways that experience blurs with dreams and imagination, the ways the mind is vulnerable to persuasion and memories to revision. As in his films, there are concentric circles of meta-worlds, there are doppelgängers, and there are lots and lots of puppets ... How much you like his films will give you a fair sense of how much patience you’re willing to extend to this novel. For my part, I have a soft spot for Mr. Kaufman’s Catskills-lodge humor, even if it does sometimes reek of flop sweat. And while the book’s endless recursions and self-references seem like the stuff of undergraduate philosophy, there’s something touching about the narrator’s hapless attempts to navigate that nonsensical world and extract truth and significance from it. I wouldn’t want to be a captive in Mr. Kaufman’s consciousness either, but being a voyeur is a different matter. There is something about this book’s extravagantly appointed lunacy that makes the lunacy of real life feel (briefly) more manageable.

Percival Everett

Positive The Wall Street Journal God bless Percival Everett, whose dozens of idiosyncratic books demonstrate a majestic indifference to literary trends, the market or his critics ... The unknown both haunts and inspires Mr. Everett’s books, and while the plot of Telephone may be straightforward, the world it depicts is no less bewildering.

Marion Poschmann, trans. Jen Calleja

Positive The Wall Street Journal The pair’s travels, which veer between the ridiculous and the macabre, satirize Orientalist clichés about enlightenment ... Gilbert’s notion of Japan is a scholar’s simulacrum. There’s something queasily hilarious about this self-centered pedant, who wouldn’t be out of place in the brainy comic novels of Don DeLillo or Nell Zink ... But even as this twisted little novel darkens, Gilbert’s self-regard remains untouched, and his pilgrimage brings him back the same person he was when he set out.

Madeleine L'Engle

Positive The Wall Street Journal These are likable, unassuming pieces that often read like exploratory outlines for longer works. Their interest to L’Engle’s admirers will be in the way they trace the arc of the author’s biography ... the heroines possess passionate sensibilities that the people around them are too dull or preoccupied to appreciate. The inborn hope that animates even the most bittersweet stories is also rooted in autobiography.

Naoise Dolan

Positive The Wall Street Journal With Naoise Dolan’s debut novel...we return to contemporary fiction’s irony-industrial complex ... Being a detached, acerbic, amoral smartass is a powerful kind of currency in the world of commitment-phobic businessmen, and Ms. Dolan is funny and touching about the internal drama of shedding a miserable identity that yields material rewards for something as incommensurable as love. The novel’s limitations are most apparent in the hasty ending: Since sarcasm is what it does best, it isn’t quite willing to risk going for long without it.

Dalia Sofer

Mixed The Wall Street Journal Ms. Sofer is at her best evoking Hamid’s pugnacious youth ... The aphoristic elegance of Ms. Sofer’s writing is one of the book’s attractions, but it is hard to square Hamid’s lucid, cultured narration with what we know of his character. Though he possesses an omniscient understanding of his descent into evil, his insights never bring about any interesting transformations. Instead, as Iranian history vanishes into the background, the chapters wallow in his feelings of shame ... While much in this book captured my imagination, the torturer’s tears left me unmoved.

Andrés Barba, Trans. by Lisa Dillman

Rave The Wall Street Journal In an acute translation by Lisa Dillman, [the narrator\'s] excavation draws on his memories, but also on the documentaries and scholarly studies that sought to explain the freakish episode, giving a gripping metaphysical dimension to the horror story ... In a manner that resembles the startling allegorical inventions of J.G. Ballard, Mr. Barba thrillingly assails the myth of childhood innocence, showing childhood to be both more euphoric and more savage than anyone had imagined—a foreign country that the rational adult mind can never fully comprehend.

Anton Chekhov, Trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Positive The Wall Street Journal What we have...is a compilation of B-sides. Mr. Pevear says nothing of this in his rather cagey preface ... the value of Fifty-Two Stories is that it humanizes Chekhov himself, reminding us that this often deified figure wrote a great deal of stuff that is decidedly mortal ... On the other hand, a few of Chekhov’s most brilliant and moving profiles in disenchantment appear ... most interesting are the first-rate stories that are less commonly anthologized.

Amity Gaige

Positive The Wall Street Journal What unfolds is a kind of running argument, as Juliet’s remorseful and contemplative account is interrupted by Michael’s boisterous, in-the-moment impressions. Both have wonders and calamities to relate ... Each drama is plentifully conceived on its own terms, but there’s a powerful cumulative effect as the strain and isolation lay bare the heart of their marital trouble ... At its best, Sea Wife achieves a lovely balance between the real and the metaphoric ... Somewhat late in the novel, Ms. Gaige introduces two plot wrinkles ... The additions take away from the book’s symmetry and momentum, and they force Ms. Gaige to spend a lot of time tying up loose ends. What readers will remember instead are the charged images of Juliet and Michael sailing with their kids toward foreign coordinates, forced to depend on each other to stay afloat.

Linda Bostrom Knausgaard, Trans. by Rachel Willson-Broyles

Mixed The Wall Street Journal Solitude is in this novel purely a torment, the painful consequence of Anna’s separation from her father, whom she imagines to be the one person who understands her true nature. Ms. Boström Knausgård is good at evoking the fragility that can afflict even the most loving families. Her sentences, translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson-Broyles, are short, dry and brittle, like tinder on the verge of combustion. The writing then takes fire in the desperate and disturbing portrait of mental illness ... The mythology, on the other hand, is vague and confusing. I wasted far too much time trying to figure out what Athena has to do with any of this—the answer seems to be very little. Ersatz allusions to antiquity litter the narrative, interrupting a powerful story in the most needless way: by goading the reader to stop to look things up on Wikipedia.

Henri Bosco, Trans. by Joyce Zonana

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... [a] charming back-to-nature fantasia ... has a timeless, romantic quality ... Bosco was an ornately old-fashioned stylist even in his day, and Ms. Zonana’s unabashedly baroque translation—words like \'grandeur\' and \'majesty\' appear regularly and without irony—seems appropriate ... The doors of perception swing wide open.

An Yu

Positive The Wall Street Journal Braised Pork produces its own kind of mind trip ... it’s written with a shimmering lightness ... Ms. An also tucks a touching love story into the strange proceedings, which supplies enough incentive to keep Jia Jia—and the reader—equally invested in boring old reality.

Heinrich Von Kleist, trans. by Michael Hoffman

Positive The Wall Street Journal Kohlhaas’s monomaniacal quest for justice, which entangles many of the region’s feuding noblemen, Martin Luther and a mysterious fortune-teller, is at once a savage indictment of a corrupt legal system and an object lesson in the ways that all-out combat can ignite from the most picayune personal slights. The remarkably distilled narrative is presented as a straight-faced historical chronicle, whose formal language is pushed toward incoherence by the insanities it relates. In Michael Hofmann, whose own writing style is frenetic and steeply erudite, the novella may have found the perfect translator.

Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Trans. by Rosalind Harvey and Jessie Mendez Sayer

Positive The Wall Street Journal Mr. Tyszka is a versatile writer who merits wider attention...blending brisk, ironic parables with dryly disenchanted commentary. This novel is, on balance, more analytic than aesthetic (the translation, by Rosalind Harvey and Jessie Mendez Sayer, is clear and straightforward), valuable especially for Sanabria’s insights into the destructively politicized nature of Chávez’s death.

Zülfü Livaneli, Trans. by Brendan Freely

Positive The Wall Street Journal The novel splits along two paths. Though Mr. Livaneli’s account of the Struma disaster is compelling, it depends on lengthy information dumps to keep the reader up to speed. But his attacks on Turkish censorship are fearless and eloquent, and all the more impressive considering his country’s propensity for imprisoning writers. A smear campaign waged against Maya speaks to a type of paranoid nationalism built on erasure and ignorance.

Paul Lynch

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... the stark, mesmerizing book reads like an existential argument between...irreconcilable truths, a Beckett play bobbing in the open water ... If the two characters seem schematically opposed—will versus fate—Mr. Lynch takes pains to confuse their relationship, changing it from mood to mood into something bitter, paternal, generous or adversarial. The novel’s foundations are like the ocean, too unfixed and unfathomable to allow the philosophical disputes to advance in a linear fashion. Both men appear courageous or cowardly, insane or transcendently wise, depending on the angle of the sunlight—as if the immensity of the setting renders even the firmest distinctions indistinct ... Mr. Lynch’s prose style is suitably rationed and sun-cured ... Though bare and isolated, this fine book contains multitudes of experience.

Marina Kemp

Positive The Wall Street Journal Closely observed, profusely detailed and probably overlong, Marguerite is what a friend of mine calls, with some annoyance, a Lives of Quiet Desperation book ... Yet there is also, happily, a great deal of engaging writing. Ms. Kemp has an uncommon ability to keep her scenes ticking along, and she’s terrific with dialogue, injecting the interactions with a brusque, colorful candor at odds with the theme of repression. Ironically, Jérôme is the life of the novel, and the sparring friendship he forges with Marguerite by way of complaints and insults provide its best moments. There’s nothing like an old man raging against the dying of the light to rouse you from stupor, and with him Marguerite gives as good as she gets.

Fernanda Melchor, Trans. by Sophie Hughes

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... a bilious, profane, blood-spattered tempest of rage against what one character calls \'the full, brutal force of male vice\' ... The chapters, written in obscenity-laden free indirect speech, are not monologues so much as diatribes. Sophie Hughes’s translation carries their furious momentum into English. They have no paragraph breaks, as if a moment’s pause would represent an unforgivable show of weakness ... This is the Mexico of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, where the extremes of evil create a pummeling, hyper-realistic effect. But the \'elemental cry\' of Ms. Melchor’s writing voice, a composite of anger and anguish, is entirely her own.

Catherine Lacey

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... marvelously elusive ... despite the book’s fundamental enigmas, the depiction of the community, with its hidden fears and traumas, is splayed-open and movingly vulnerable ... Ms. Lacey is interested in peeling back the ritual of confession and forgiveness, finding dark correspondences with cruelty (the way that confession resembles interrogation) and collective amnesia (the way that forgiveness prompts forgetfulness) ... Ms. Lacey’s is a ghostly, largely ungraspable fiction that dreams of \'the idea of a disembodied world.\'

Chelsea Bieker

Mixed The Wall Street Journal In one sense, Godshot is as predictable as its villains are evil. The ritualized atrocities of the religious sect that considers women’s bodies to be \'church property\' has much in common with the world of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and its thousand-and-one imitators. The story also takes a turn toward the sort of New Age feminist empowerment that has been in vogue since Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. But dwelling on comparisons doesn’t do justice to the surreal qualities of Ms. Bieker’s imagined cult, whose gimcrack hoaxes are set alongside the most sinister megalomania ... Lacey May’s account of her part in the nightmare is softened by her innocence and unspoiled instinct for love ... Godshot culminates in a dizzying depiction of childbirth—a true holy rite that instantly reveals the falseness of the rest.

Jon Fosse, Trans. by Damion Searls

Positive The Wall Street Journal Like most of Mr. Fosse’s numerous works of fiction, The Other Name is stark, serious, thoroughly interior and written in an unbroken stream of consciousness that does not call to mind the flowing of a river so much as the steady drip of a thawing glacier ... In Damion Searls’s expertly restrained translation, the writing has the artless, improvised feel of an extended prayer, passing through repetitions, drab descriptive formulas and sudden moments of fervency ... in this book’s rhythmic accumulation of words, something incantatory and self-annihilating—something that feels almost holy.

Kevin Nguyen

Mixed The Wall Street Journal ...[a] pensive, downbeat debut ... Mr. Nguyen is insightful and precise about the particular kind of emptiness that can infect the tech world, where actual people have less value than the user data they represent ... But the atmosphere of pointlessness, however finely observed, derails the storytelling. Subplots are introduced—such as the cybercrime Lucas and Margo collude on at the start of the novel—and then simply drift away like forgotten ideas. It isn’t just Lucas who misses Margo; Mr. Nguyen doesn’t seem quite sure what to do without her.

J. M Coetzee

Mixed The Wall Street Journal With The Death of Jesus...J.M. Coetzee concludes a trilogy of obscurely allegorical novels...whose mixture of aloof understatement, philosophical discourse and cryptic symbolism has managed to bore and intrigue in equal measure ... The Death of Jesus is much more emotionally involving because of its wrenching portrayal of David’s death—that is, its version of the Passion. But other scriptural allusions seem contrived. There is a sense that Mr. Coetzee has simply stripped the Bible for parts, losing its meanings in the process. The meaning most missed, I think, concerns the nature of faith, which Mr. Coetzee approaches from a strictly secular point of view, conflating it with desire and desperation and a kind of intellectual abandon. His fundamental skepticism extends to the writing, which rummages provocative ideas but never creates the novelistic texture or density to reach a pitch of real mystery, settling instead for mere incomprehension ... however probing and intelligent, the trilogy’s inquiry into belief is too speculative—too much of an exercise—to bring about that suspension of disbelief in the reader.

Anne Enright

Rave The Wall Street Journal The problem of truly knowing the people one is closest to haunts this behind-the-curtains drama ... For all of the emotional tumult in Actress, however, there is also a great deal of simple and wonderfully immersive storytelling, particularly in the evocations of Katherine’s beginnings in an itinerant theater troupe ... There is something that seems effortless about Ms. Enright’s writing—an illusion, of course, but one brilliantly sustained. Her anecdotes are charming, perceptive and raconteurial without histrionics. Like a great actress, the author is made invisible by the spell of her performance ... By the end of Actress the prose has become high-strung and insistent, an outlet for long-repressed anger ... I will confess that I missed the glamour and excitement of the opening of the book, when the play was the thing. But I don’t deny the bare-knuckled force of Ms. Enright’s unanswerable concluding question. Who are we, to ourselves and to others, when our illusions finally fail?

James McBride

Mixed The Wall Street Journal He’s great at front-stoop banter and again he creates fond, funny portrayals of community old-timers ... But with this book he may have spread himself too thin ... He shifts from broad, slapstick comedy to shoot-’em-up violence to nostalgic meditations on New York history. There is even, for reasons I couldn’t quite grasp, a subplot involving a hidden work of art that was smuggled out of Europe after World War II. All of it is readable but none of it stands out, making the novel, much like its shambling hero, a likable but minor eccentricity.

Claude McKay

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... gorgeously seamy ... An unshackled and bitingly funny melodrama plays out in the bars of Marseille’s Vieux Port ... McKay revels in this human glue pot of blacks, Arabs, whites, straights and gays, prostitutes, gigolos, dockworkers and seamen, schemers, dreamers and political rabble-rousers. The language he fashions mirrors the mélange, blending vernacular with showy archaisms and words of McKay’s own invention. The fusion is as heady and bewitching as the scene of a Vieux Port dance floor, where \'everybody was close together in a thick juice melted by wine and music.\'

Tina May Hall

Mixed The Wall Street Journal Ms. Hall is my favorite kind of writer, a born poet who turns to prose and imbues that rather proletarian form with the grace and lightness of verse ... But the mishmash of The Snow Collectors defeated me. Grafted onto Henna’s psychological drama are acts of sudden violence that could come, as Henna puts it, from \'some cut-rate thriller.\' Added to all that is a bizarre gothic romance involving the village police chief, whose ancestors were connected with the Franklin expedition. The story wobbles between these genres like the needle on a broken compass. It doesn’t lead you into mystery so much as simply get you lost.

Elizabeth Cook

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... intelligence, originality and poetic grace ... Ms. Cook reflects on the momentous change by tenderly humanizing all of these larger-than-life characters. Her portrayal of Bathsheba is both more compassionate and more convincing than the usual caricature of a power-hungry seductress. Her David, too, is remarkably approachable ... Again and again in this discerning novel, sin and suffering culminate in a majestic work of humility and praise.

Hilary Leichter

Positive The Wall Street Journal ...delirious and deeply humane satire ... Temporary has the manic, goofing energy of a lounge act. Its target isn’t only corporate drudgery or amoral profiteering but also the precarious state that makes people feel desperately lucky to even get a shot at the terrible jobs. Being a novelist is also an insecure racket, and like her endlessly accommodating temp, Ms. Leichter works hard to keep the audience amused ... But behind the painted-on smile is the melancholy of impermanence.

Eimear McBride

Mixed The Wall Street Journal If Ms. McBride really believes that elevated writing is insincere, she shouldn’t do it. But for me, the gamesome, Joycean wordplay is the best thing about Strange Hotel, however mannered it sometimes becomes. Certainly the baroque tangle of the main character’s \'inverted chats,\' as she dubs her monologues, is more interesting than yet another plainspoken confrontation with repressed trauma. Ms. McBride’s brilliance lies in her arrangements of the glorious garble of language. I hope she won’t keep apologizing for it.

Andrew Krivak

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... strange and strangely tender ... Mr. Krivak balances this sort of mysticism with closely observed descriptions of sewing leather for shoes, carving wood for bows and arrows or spotting eddies to fish for trout. These activities are endowed with such fullness of meaning that you have to assign this short, touching book its own category: the post-apocalypse utopia.

Jonathan Tel

Positive The Wall Street Journal Counterfeiters are everywhere in the scam-or-be-scammed rat race Mr. Tel entertainingly depicts ... Mr. Tel is excellent at subtly warping the ordinary experiences of his characters, blending the real with the absurd. His one misstep is in a kind of narrative distortion, in which the Western Sinophile \'author\' of these stories appears as a character to warn about his own reliability. This reads like a sop to critics of cultural appropriation. But Mr. Tel’s stories are good enough to need no disclaimer.

Luke Geddes

Mixed The Wall Street Journal ... there are a few enjoyable deep dives into the musty subculture of antique selling. Disappointingly, Mr. Geddes treats that subculture largely as a backdrop for zany eccentrics. The comedy is aggressively quirky, a word that should be listed as an antonym of \'funny\' ... In the novel’s most torturously contrived twist, a lonely, misunderstood deltiologist—or postcard hobbyist—accidentally kidnaps a toddler, which sets the novel’s few plot gears into creaky motion.

Aharon Appelfeld

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... [Applefeld\'s] novels are ahistorical and philosophic, moral dramas that have left the confines of eyewitness testimony for the realm of fable and allegory ... is in part a hymn to the vitalizing force of Jewish tradition. But its battered optimism is universal, as well. Where do you go for wisdom? the book asks. What is your community? What are the convictions that charge your daily tasks with meaning? Find those things, and no trial is unendurable.

Zora Neale Hurston

Rave The Wall Street Journal The splendid stories that editor Genevieve West has gathered, written between 1921 and 1937...demonstrate the author’s double vision. They combine the warmth and affection of an insider with the documentary rigor—and ironic amusement—of a neutral observer. In form, the stories are hardly groundbreaking: slices-of-life in Eatonville and Harlem or dramas involving low-down men who either are reformed by good-hearted women or meet a fitting comeuppance. But each is a showcase for a remarkably vital dialect ... This whole collection is, in one character’s words, \'big as life an’ brassy as tacks.\'

Megan Angelo

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... [an] intelligent page-turner ... The throwaway suspense plot involves a paternity secret that links the characters in the two time frames. But the fun of Followers is the way it carries today’s social media bread-and-circus to possible extremes.

Varlam Shalamov, trans. by Donald Rayfield

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... remarkable for both [its] historical witness and their literary integrity ... The stories will change the way you think about the miracle of basic bodily functions. I have never read a writer who paid such serious attention to the act of defecation—for malnourished prisoners a fraught, agonizing process ... Shalamov writes from a place beyond embarrassment, beyond fear and beyond consolation. The stories are fiction by a man who had long ceased to believe in fictions ... In Mr. Rayfield’s highly readable translation, the main qualities are directness and spontaneity, as though Shalamov were describing a picture in his mind ... It is the precision, and often even the beauty, of these descriptions that astonishes most. Strange as it sounds, although there is no hope in these stories, there is no sense of nihilism either.

John Sayles

Rave The Wall Street Journal This is narrative in the full-throated, small-D democratic spirit of John Dos Passos, moving among a huge cast of interconnected characters, from the city’s pushover mayor to an itinerant pole-dancer who makes a killing at the pop-up strip club catering to the platoons of oil riggers with unaccustomed cash to burn ... However rigorously grounded in research, Yellow Earth is at heart a fable about capitalism in its purest form ... The finest passages illustrate how far the siren song can travel ... It’s easy to feel lost in a novel with this much sprawl. Complex information—historical, political, legal, environmental, geological—is sprayed with fire-hose force and volume. But Mr. Sayles writes with such verve and colloquial humor that even the most esoteric issues brighten with fascination ... Mr. Sayles superbly dramatizes the man-made disruptions in his novel’s small pond, but in a book motored by anarchy the most unsettling section occurs when the boom goes bust, bringing Yellow Earth to a surprisingly quiet conclusion: the depiction of a modern-day ghost town.

Jerome Charyn

Positive The Wall Street Journal Mr. Charyn, who is now 82, writes with the sort of whirlwind energy that turns the seediest story into a breakneck adventure. Whole chapters seem to have been expelled in single exhalations, as though the author had the breath control of an opera tenor. It’s a dark art to make a subject this grotesque quite this much fun.

Rye Curtis

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... although Mr. Curtis again complicates the expected adventure-novel payoff, the truth is that Debra just isn’t interesting enough to justify the amount of ink used on her ... Or maybe she’s only uninteresting compared to Cloris, whose narration grows increasingly vulnerable, surprising and profound.

Lance Olsen

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... whirling, kinetoscopic ... brief, brightly flashing chapters ... The vertiginous feeling created in these chapters is one of all the parts of history plummeting together toward an appointed destiny. Mr. Olsen understands that his setting—Berlin in 1927—is inherently portentous, weighty with foreshadowing, and he freely darts ahead in time to describe the fates of each famous personage. Their endings are inscribed on their lives, making the city a kind of phantasmagoria filled with the living dead ... To differentiate these perspectives, Mr. Olsen likes to toy with typography. Words are arranged on the page with the same variety as accents and personality traits. The effect is disorienting but rarely opaque, because on the sentence level Mr. Olsen is a fine, clear stylist. The jostling, headlong pace of the novel means that the experimentations don’t have time to harden into gimmickry ... More than anything, My Red Heaven captures the eeriness of a city on the brink of an epochal descent into barbarism. For all its strangeness, the novel’s meaning is unmistakable.

Daniel Kehlmann, Trans. by Ross Benjamin

Rave The Wall Street Journal You don’t need any knowledge of the Ulenspiegel legend to appreciate this brilliant, blackly sardonic retelling ... In Mr. Kehlmann’s unforgettable joker we have a picture of humankind in all of its madness and strutting pride

Ben Okri

Mixed The Wall Street Journal As a critique of totalitarianism, The Freedom Artist is unimpressive, but it stands out for its philosophical dimensions. It can be read as a kind of revision of Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which art, rather than offering distracting illusions, can tap into foundational truths and help us free ourselves from the prison of existence. The concise, declarative prose and the parable-like architecture of the stories resemble ancient forms of wisdom literature ... strange and rousing.

Miranda Popkey

Pan The Wall Street Journal The novel’s form is so transparently indebted to Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy—narrated by a woman in crisis who seems to rebuild her identity by drawing from the stories people tell her—that one looks for ways that Ms. Popkey has distinguished her work from its model. One way, unfortunately, is in style. Where Ms. Cusk’s prose is stern, mandarin and sharply aphoristic, Ms. Popkey’s is slow and tongue-tied, circling the same few ideas and further belabored by pointless stage directions that read like the nervous tics of a writer who distrusts the worth of what she’s saying ... The result is a book that, set against Ms. Cusk’s pitiless transcriptions, feels maudlin and needy, as though it sought absolution for the narrator’s behavior instead of simply presenting it ... These bits tell us how to think about the narrator, but like too much in this unfocused book, do nothing to reveal who she is.

Stefan Hertmans, Trans. by David McKay

Positive The Wall Street Journal The story Mr. Hertmans tells is drawn from real historical sources; his book is what is sometimes referred to as a nonfiction novel. Following such writers as W.G. Sebald, Emmanuel Carrère and Patrick Modiano, he splices his own travels and research into the rendering of the past. It is easy to see why this technique attracts writers from Europe, where history is omnipresent ... The limpid translation, from the Dutch, is by David McKay ... The double narrative has a practical purpose, too. Hamoutal’s fortunes are almost unrelievedly heartbreaking, so Mr. Hertmans’s detours into the \'mundane world\' of the present, though uninteresting in themselves, offer a reprieve from the piled-up miseries of her life. I confess to being divided in my opinion about this. Part of me thinks it’s something of a cheat, a way to make tragedy more palatable. But part of me is grateful for the consolations of context and hindsight. Leavening the story’s many horrors is the miracle of its preservation. Somehow, nearly a millennium later, Hamoutal has been remembered and honored.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens

Pan The Wall Street Journal Is it, as the exhibition catalog [in the book] contends, \'a profound exploration of privacy, memory, and the instability of truth\'? Or is it all a somewhat random muddle from a debut writer prone to mistaking weirdness for profundity? I lean toward the latter. Though Ms. Stevens conjures a tantalizing vision of the city at night—a murky, unreal space, like Persephone’s underworld—her story is too slight to make the setting meaningful. We follow Percy as she wanders around, buys kitchen appliances, chats with neighbors or drafts emails to her perfidious fiancé. There’s a narcoleptic quality to her commentary ... Ms. Stevens uses it to break up continuous action, as though Percy is constantly dozing off for a second or two as she moves through the world. The novel resembles one of those dreams in which you are trying to run but your legs feel stuck in quicksand. However curious and intriguingly symbolic the dream may be, it’s a relief to wake up.

Edward St Aubyn

Rave The Wall Street Journal The British author has let it be known that virtually everything that has happened to Patrick is based in autobiography. Yet instead of recording his experiences in tear-jerker memoirs, Mr. St. Aubyn has transmuted them into stunning, sparkling fiction ... Patrick is \'desperate to escape the self-subversion of irony and say what he really meant.; Yet Mr. St. Aubyn\'s feat is in exploiting the same ironical trap for the purposes of art. That sense of detachment—the state of simultaneously being yourself and viewing yourself as though from a distance—is the key to his ability to evoke the pitch and heave of trauma while describing it with devastating lucidity. Who knows how much payment in tears and blood it cost him to forge his style from the material of a harrowing life, but the Patrick Melrose novels justify the often denigrated (often with good reason) form of the autobiographical novel ... for readers who have followed Patrick through Mr. St. Aubyn\'s unforgettable novels, the story\'s conclusion is deeply affecting ... It is a beautiful and startlingly hopeful place to leave Patrick once and for all.

David Shields

Pan The Wall Street Journal David Shields\'s Reality Hunger has...immodest ambition and exhorter\'s zeal ... there will be readers (and I\'m among them) who take issue with the way that Mr. Shields divorces a novel\'s form from its content. Reality Hunger makes virtually no mention of fiction\'s capacity for emotional discovery or, as old-fashioned as it sounds, moral instruction. Many people have little interest in reading things that are purely simulacra of anxious everyday disorder; they look to books to escape that disorder or to make sense of it, to stir their deepest feelings or their noblest impulses in ways that real life rarely does ... Reality Hunger is less a manifesto than a narcissistic exercise. By the time you reach entry No. 194 or so, it\'s hard to avoid the suspicion that Mr. Shields is indifferent to perspectives that vary from his own. Instead, because he has a short attention span, so must the rest of the world.

Julio Ramon Ribeyro, Trans. by Katherine Silver

Positive The Wall Street Journal The book’s title alludes to the voices of the underclass within these stories, which often center on Peru’s bricklayers or fishermen ... Balancing the naturalism are paranormal tales reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe. A character becomes obsessed with, and haunted by, his double. Others stumble upon signs of their approaching death. I like the spooky absurdity of \'The Insignia,\' in which a man finds a curiously engraved ring in a trash can. Upon wearing it, he is invited into a shadowy cabal, and over the years he rises in its ranks and is eventually appointed president—without ever learning what exactly the group is...

Garth Greenwell

Mixed The Wall Street Journal What further unites the books is Mr. Greenwell’s distinctive grammatical signature of connecting independent clauses with comma splices...Though the sentences are run-ons, their parts have been carefully balanced so as to achieve a sense of equilibrium—a syntactical cleanness—that contrasts with the narrator’s disorderly emotions ... Yet Mr. Greenwell’s stylistic accomplishment can only do so much to compensate for his books’ essential self-absorption. Sofia continues to be a vaguely exotic backdrop for the narrator’s escapades, a motif rather than a setting. And though R. is treated more tenderly than the street hustler patronizingly portrayed in What Belongs to You, he’s still fundamentally a cipher, the archetypal beautiful foreigner who always seems to be available to carpetbagging Americans, straight or gay. Cleanness

John L'Heureux

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... howling, savagely powerful short stories ... They abound in grace, but as in O’Connor’s short fiction, the appearance of grace is grotesque and horrifying—it arrives, as Jesus said he came, not to bring peace but a sword ... The flaming sword of irony cuts a swath through all of L’Heureux’s stories ... For all of their severity, these stories are almost wholly free of judgment. The universality of sin and guilt is the source of the wild, jagged laughter that blasts through the pages. There is something scarily exhilarating about the intransigence of L’Heureux’s vision for humankind. Most contemporary fiction travels a safe, well-trod path from crisis to redemption; the author plays God, throwing his characters a life preserver. Redemption is available for L’Heureux’s characters, too, of course. But, in one last irony, not while they are still in the world to yearn for it.

Elizabeth Bowen

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... beautifully reissued with an effusive introduction by John Banville ... passions, hatreds and heartbreaks are hidden amid the prosaic effects of the drawing room and the boudoir, like a leopard camouflaged by savannah grass. Bowen (1899-1973) was a master of concealment, and though her stories deal in the ordinary and the everyday, they are disturbed by the immense spectral presence of the unspoken.

Douglas Stuart

Positive The Wall Street Journal Titling the novel after Shuggie rather than the woman who dominates him seems like small gesture of defiance on Mr. Stuart’s part. Shuggie is a pariah twice over, both because of his allegiance to his mother and because of the effeminate tendencies that single him out to bullies and sexual predators ... Both are legion in the novel’s unvarnished characterization of Glasgow’s slums ... If the portrayal is unsparing, it is also familial, because Mr. Stuart vividly inhabits the city’s singular \'Weegie\' dialect and vocabulary ... But most of all, Shuggie Bain is a novel of addiction, and as is the way with addicts, Agnes belligerently demands the bulk of the book’s attention. There is a powerful, if wearying, consistency in her perpetual relapses, her outrageous lies and public spectacles, as well as in Shuggie’s thwarted attempts to get out from under her. It’s the obstinate Bain pride that prevents this novel from becoming a wallow in victimhood and gives it its ruined dignity. Agnes will suffer any humiliation for a drink, but she’ll give you an earful at the first suggestion of pity.

Virginie Despentes Trans. by Frank Wynne

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... translated by the reliably outstanding Frank Wynne ... with Vernon Subutex, a sprawling, scintillating panorama of contemporary Paris, [Despentes] has produced a bona fide magnum opus ... A master of the free indirect style, Ms. Despentes inhabits the minds of a diverse cast of characters while doing for Paris what Joyce did for Dublin ... While Ms. Despentes can be a savage observer of that world, she’s also capable of creating moments of surpassing vulnerability. Yet the quality that struck this reader most forcibly is her freedom of thought. She simply does not care about political niceties, which allows her to extend imaginatively—though always unsparingly—into the lives of the losers, abusers, outcasts and reactionaries who brush shoulders on the Métro every morning. In contrast to the cautious moralizing of so much American fiction, Ms. Despentes’s teeming feat of negative capability is all the more exhilarating.

Juan Carlos Onetti, Trans. by Katherine Silver

Positive The Wall Street Journal Many stories take macabre twists ... Here too is an eerie doppelgänger tale, \'The Twins,\' about a pair of desperate Spanish prostitutes. In the collection’s title story, a woman contracts a theater company to stage the events of a dream she has had, to be viewed by her alone ... The strange, evanescent scene they perform curdles into a nightmare, and in the story’s hallucinatory effects one can see the seeds of the magical-realist style that would soon revolutionize fiction.

Rosa Liksom, Trans. by Lola Rogers

Positive The Wall Street Journal Ms. Liksom is fearlessly good at portraying wicked men in all their moods and disguises. (Her fantastic novel Compartment No. 6 features a similar, and similarly compelling, figure.) The narrator herself is not always as persuasive. It is only after the war, when the Colonel makes her the outlet for his sadism, that she repents of her past ... the novel is strongest when it’s most direct about why people engage in evil: Because they enjoy it.

Shannon Pufahl

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... moody, furtive ... [Pufahl] depicts her characters in elegant chiaroscuro, always half sunken in shadows. She is especially good at a form of elliptical poker-table dialogue that says everything except what it really means. The tumbleweed desolation exacts a toll, as well, as the novel is somber and humorless, with long arid stretches in which no one feels any emotion at all.

Jorge Comensal, Trans. by Charlotte Whittle

Positive The Wall Street Journal In this caustic, pitch-black comic debut, the insights all point toward the fundamental frailty of the body and the overpowering strength of death ... In brusque, bitten-off prose Mr. Comensal captures the patient’s rapid and humiliating decline, allowing him nothing in the way of redemption. This is a mean and narrow, if creditably undeluded, little novel. The last word goes to the parrot.

Fleur Jaeggy Trans. by Tim Parks

Positive The Wall Street Journal Ms. Jaeggy, a Swiss author who writes in Italian, excellently conjures the mortuary eroticism one finds in other European novelists like Thomas Mann and Alberto Moravia...The difference is that Ms. Jaeggy’s prose is whittled and blade-like. Tim Parks’s translation has a startling directness that can almost feel over-pronounced ... Like the boarding school, this short, piercing book maintains an illusion of order, of control. In reality, madness reigns.

Kevin Wilson

Rave The Wall Street Journal ...[an] inventive and hilarious debut novel ... Mr. Wilson\'s depictions of the blithely cannibalistic nature of the movie industry are worthy of Bruce Wagner, the modern master of Hollywood satire ... Even grown up, Buster and Annie find it hard to shake the fear that they have no reality other than as performance pieces.But the two are artists themselves, an actress and a writer. As The Family Fang unfolds a cunning and comic final act, they bravely subsume themselves in their callings, finding a means to recover their identities. This is complex psychological ground, and the 32-year-old Mr. Wilson navigates it with a calm experience that his tender age shouldn\'t allow.

Michael Frank

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... is in many ways a soothingly traditional production ... The complicated family unit [the protagonist] ultimately forms is very much like this rewarding novel: something that may appear basic and old-fashioned but is in reality built on uncharted ground.

Russell Rowland

Positive The Wall Street Journal Mr. Rowland takes a businesslike attitude toward the novel’s plot, introducing his cast of characters and digging into to their respective problems like a worker carving out a posthole. Awesome natural beauty is a staple of Montana fiction, but Cold Country has little time for reveries of that sort. Much of the action is set during the \'dull season\' of winter, when \'every speck of color drains from its home and soaks into the soil.\' Mr. Rowland means to put paid to any idealization of the West you might still be clinging to ... the [last] scene has the quality of one of Agatha Christie’s country-house mysteries. But this is Montana, so there’s no genteel detective to finger the culprit. Instead, there’s a massive brawl and the truth is beaten free.

Maaza Mengiste

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... a work of reclamation in a number of ways. For one thing, the story, which dramatizes the invasion and the tenacious Ethiopian resistance, shines a light on a conflict that has often been forgotten behind the battles of the world war that followed it. Ms. Mengiste furthermore centers on the Ethiopian women who played a vital but almost completely unrecognized role in the insurgency. But most important, The Shadow King is not a story about helpless victims of colonial conquest. Against the odds, it is written in a key of pride and exaltation, and its characters have the outsize form of national heroes ... Ms. Mengiste ambitiously stretches her canvas to include colliding perspectives ... The battle scenes—the best passages in this busy, stirring novel—also have a strongly visual, even cinematic, flair.

Niall Williams

Positive The Wall Street Journal In the pre-modern idyll fashioned by Mr. Williams, beauty stands out a little more sharply, and feelings are experienced with more directness and intensity ... A meandering, often delightful, rural rhapsody, This Is Happiness recalls only what was sublime about the simple life in Faha. The people are phlegmatic, God-fearing, and generous to the point of martyrdom. There is no small amount of blarney in this. I laughed out loud at Noel’s astonishing claim that \'there was little culture of complaint\' during that era, as though glorious grumblers like Sean O’Casey and Patrick Kavanagh had never put pen to paper.

Danielle Evans

Positive The Wall Street Journal Ms. Evans\'s strong voice seems to be doing battle with constricting workshop rites and formulas ... The characters tend to be stuck in an unhappy emotional standstill—\'waiting to be a different person,\' as one puts it. The stories have little action, and their central metaphors are lit up in neon ... What\'s distinctive about Ms. Evans\'s voice is most apparent in her best story, \'The King of a Vast Empire,\' which takes on severe familial dysfunction in a dry, funny way ... Now that Ms. Evans has gotten the requisite stories about minor-key, quarterlife dejection out of the way, she can move on to the hard work of developing the individual style she clearly possesses.

Hiroko Oyamada, Trans. by David Boyd

Mixed The Wall Street Journal Ms. Oyamada toys with some interesting narrative effects ... captures the woozy, disassociated feeling of plugging along in a pointless office routine. In this case, though, you’re paying for the experience, not vice versa.

Juan Jose Millas, Trans. by Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn

Rave The Wall Street Journal ...[a] brief, elusive novel ... What I love about this book, in its low-key translation from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn, is the way that the story, which begins as entertaining slapstick, subtly metamorphoses into fable ... Damián becomes a living ghost—\'closer to being a thought than a flesh-and-blood human being\'—and as his vivid imaginary world fuses with reality this deceptively ethereal novel advances toward a dark and startling finale.

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, Trans. by Frank Wynne

Mixed The Wall Street Journal Mr. Del Amo concentrates on the brute physical aspects of life on the farm, describing with stomach-turning flamboyance the slimy, spurting realities of breeding, birthing, castration and culling ... Animalia is not only a showpiece for obscure anatomical diction, it is also a broadside against the horrors of animal farming. But as a polemic the novel is incoherent, as it can’t decide whether humans make themselves beast-like by their vile treatment of animals or whether they are, like animals, simply vile in their very nature ... The relish with which Mr. Del Amo displays his repugnance at decay and all other bodily processes makes for a weird mixture of shock effect and prudishness.

Andrew Miller

Positive The Wall Street Journal Mr. Miller strikes an impressive balance between adventure and atmosphere. As in a good thriller, madness bubbles beneath the surface of the scenes, especially those involving Calley, whose version of the massacre grows less reliable as his monomania for finding Lacroix intensifies ... But while the threat of violence keeps the story’s wheels in motion, its greatest pleasures owe to its unhurried, ambulatory pacing. Mr. Miller takes his time describing the parallel journeys to the Scottish wilderness, and as he fills the chapters with rich, scenic details he disperses the fog of secrecy obscuring past events ... Freedom arrives in this lush and satisfying novel not by way of escape but from a final confrontation with the truth.

Margaret Atwood

Mixed The Wall Street Journal Canonicity is very much at issue in The Testaments ... while many details sync with the TV show’s unfolding storyline, others appear to purposely diverge from what devoted viewers have been led to expect...Suffice it to say that certain nuances of The Testaments will be missed by those who have merely read The Handmaid’s Tale. All sequels presuppose a certain degree of background knowledge, but this is the first time you need a subscription to Hulu ... We are here dealing with something categorically different from a literary sequel. More accurately, The Testaments is a new installment in a multimedia franchise ... What if you were to read it without boning up on episode recaps? You’d find an engaging if largely insubstantial page turner ... The most disappointing effect of this streamlining is the way it flattens the writing ... it is in the subtle warping and twisting of values we share as our own that The Testaments is at its best ... a work of explanation ... Ms. Atwood has written one for the fans.

Elizabeth Strout

Positive The Wall Street Journal Ms. Strout steers us away from the feel-good finish line of compassion and toward the stony terrain of objective truth ... It’s worth noting that while newcomers can still enjoy this book, Ms. Strout’s constant readers will get the most out of it ... Olive is a brilliant creation not only because of her eternal cantankerousness but because she’s as brutally candid with herself about her shortcomings as she is with others. Her honesty makes people strangely willing to confide in her, and the raw power of Ms. Strout’s writing comes from these unvarnished exchanges, in which characters reveal themselves in all of their sadness and badness and confusion ... The great, terrible mess of living is spilled out across the pages of this moving book. Ms. Strout may not have any answers for it, but she isn’t afraid of it either.

Percival Everett

Rave The Wall Street Journal Erasure is more than a decade old, but the depiction of Oprah Winfrey as a clucking, mugging Aunt Mammy still seems breathtakingly illicit—and even extend to the masterpieces of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Monk, who rejects racial distinctions, is portrayed as the contemporary invisible man, black in the eyes of the white world, not \'black enough\' in the black world ... Mr. Everett of course knows that trying to deny racial classification is hopeless; his awareness charges Erasure with both quixotic idealism and mordant resignation.

Leah Price

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... a witty, tonic rebuttal to the latest round of doomsday prognostications about the fate of literature ... it’s hard to disagree with Ms. Price’s tacit argument that the book community would be a healthier place if its gatekeepers were a little less precious about what happens there.

Edna O'Brien

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... bristling ... fast and focused and it inhabits Maryam’s point of view with unapologetic authority ... unflinching in her depictions of rape, though the dispatch and descriptive restraint of these scenes prevent them from seeming gratuitous. Maryam relives her story with a kind of numbed impartiality, as though recalling something from a great distance. Yet a striking effect of syntax belies her stoicism. Her narrative switches continuously between the past and the present tense, emphasizing the way her memories flood into the moment of their telling, as though they were happening all over again. You could call this compression of past and present the omnipresent tense, and it’s an ingenious way of evoking the feeling of recurrence suffered by trauma victims ... Still, stylistic virtuosity has a price, and in Girl it’s the sense of disconnection between Maryam and the novel’s poeticized language ... The formal elegance of this writing, with its alliteration and elevated diction, comes from the author rather than the character, and the sheen of artificiality may stop readers from fully releasing themselves to the dark spell of the tale.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Mixed The Wall Street Journal Mr. Coates smoothly melds the characteristics of comic-book fantasy with his period setting. The writing is fluent and appealing and the dialogue moves effortlessly into elevated pronouncements ... Often when public intellectuals turn to fiction, their storytelling tends to be just another means of working out arguments and ideas: Its allegorical trappings make it seem artificial. In The Water Dancer this problem is most apparent in the conceit of Conduction, which Mr. Coats is torn between treating as an actual superpower that motors the plot and as a metaphor for the process of emancipation ... eloquent but vague. (If the power is activated by memories and stories, why would only select people possess it?) Conduction is tirelessly analyzed but only rarely carried out—which is to say, there’s a lot of talk in this novel, but not enough tale.

Alix Nathan

Positive The Wall Street Journal Social dominance, and the violent means used to maintain it, unites the various storylines in The Warlow Experiment. In the novel’s hectic conclusion Ms. Nathan stages a series of moral awakenings and comeuppances that overturn the expected order of things. These feel forced and not terribly convincing. But Warlow’s plight itself is indelible, both pungent and horrifying in its details and profound as a metaphor—a symbol of upper-class barbarity stashed away in the cellar like a telltale heart beating beneath the floorboards.

Amitav Ghosh

Positive The Wall Street Journal How can novelists address climate change without turning their books into seminars? Mr. Ghosh’s neat trick is to fold the subject into a juicy (if somewhat breathless) academic mystery of the sort popularized by Umberto Eco. The difference is that Deen’s discoveries don’t expose some all-explanatory conspiracy but rather a deeper sense of uncertainty and disorder. The more puzzle pieces he fits together, the more chaos he reveals—which makes for an accurate depiction of the world as we know it.

Caitlin Horrocks

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... marvelous ... wonderfully embellishes the world through which Satie wandered like some kind of marooned alien visitor ... Bohemian Paris is the setting of a lot of romantic kitsch, but not here. The art is real but so is the squalor, and usually, Ms. Horrocks suggests, the latter defeats the former ... It’s the family and friends who give breadth and dimension to this novel...Their stories ground The Vexations in the realm of ordinary mortal travail.

Rob Hart

Mixed The Wall Street Journal This is pretty cheeseball stuff, but the real food for thought in The Warehouse is in the story of Cloud’s ascent, which is achieved less through force than by exploiting recognizable fears of climate change and gun violence ... Cloud has eliminated mass shootings, reversed global warming, created record-low unemployment rates and made shopping faster and easier than ever. Are we certain that the average person wouldn’t willingly trade his freedoms for all of that?

Ellen Meloy

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... a posthumous collection of regional sketches that remind us of our coequal status in the animal kingdom ... The brief essays in Seasons were written to be read for local radio and they’re buoyed by a wonderful conversational ease and puckish sense of humor.

James Alan McPherson

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... unsparing, caustically funny ... Not everything in Hue and Cry has escaped the ravages of time. The portrayals of hipster counterculture seem dated, as do the caricatured renderings of homosexuals. What continues to impress is the moody, bluesy feeling of loneliness, and the connected yearning to belong.

Madeline Ffitch

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... disputation is the soundtrack to this delightfully raucous debut novel ... Ms. Ffitch’s superb comic novel evolves as well, touchingly depicting the tangled and tenacious family bonds that develop in wild places.

Lila Savage

Rave The Wall Street Journal ... quietly wonderful ... Like her unforgettable main character, Ms. Savage addresses these moral dilemmas with no judgment whatsoever, but rather a kind of awe at her own temerity in even thinking about them ... will likely make you cry, as well, but this is a rare novel in which such responses feel clean and ennobling, free from manipulation. It is a book written for the better angels of our nature.

Mike Freedman

Positive The Wall Street Journal ... [a] bonkers business satire ... The novel is pure in its cynicism, in that it doesn’t offer a single sympathetic character to throw these soulless buffoons into relief. (In this it reminded me of Helen DeWitt’s savage office farce Lightning Rods from 2011.) The nauseating extra irony is that, for all its noise and passion, the battle between Wharton and Fink signifies nothing, since the corporate world is protected in such a way that even its so-called losers don’t actually lose anything beyond a modicum of prestige.

Richard Russo

Mixed The Wall Street Journal Mr. Russo is off and running, effortlessly shifting between past and present as he furnishes the details of the men’s lives. Regular readers of the author will encounter some very familiar pleasures, whether it’s his portrayal of the jokey, spiky back-and-forth of longstanding friendship or the appearance of colorful side characters ... But while Mr. Russo has never been averse to Dickensian melodrama, he’s added more schmaltz than usual to Chances Are . . . Indeed, the nostalgia reaches threat level orange. More troublesome is the somewhat half-hearted grab at topicality in his reliance on a missing girl, the single most overused gimmick in fiction today. The homiletic conversations about violence against women amplify the awkward absence of women’s perspectives. Mr. Russo is often sure-handed with current events...but this time you get the sense that he hasn’t caught up with the news cycle.