Reviewed: Point Omega by Don DeLillo
In his last few novels, DeLillo’s storytelling ambitions have shrunk along with his page count. Point Omega, in which a filmmaker travels to the desert to interview one of the architects of the Iraq War, continues the troubling trend. READ MORE >

Reviewed: The Privileges by Jonathan Dee
Dee’s fifth novel follows the rise of the Moreys, a fantastically rich, philanthropic, overleveraged family. By novel’s end, they are parodies of fortune, a timely example of obsessive achievers in denial. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Noah’s Compass by Anne Tyler
In this story of 60-year-old Liam Pennywell, who’s trying to remember the details of a break-in at his home, Anne Tyler does what she’s been doing for more than 45 years—producing deep insight from the investigation of ordinary lives. READ MORE >

Reviewed: The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris
A self-consciously serious follow-up to Then We Came to the End, Ferris’ sophomore novel, about a man with a rare disease that forces him to walk great distances, takes far too long to gather steam. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Perfect Rigor by Masha Gessen
In 2002, Grigori Perelman unveiled the solution to one of the world’s most difficult math problems. He spent the next few years disappearing from the math world—and the world in general. This gripping book tells the story of a reclusive genius. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life by Carol Sklenicka
In addition to parsing the famous literary soap opera that was Carver’s relationship with editor Gordon Lish (“Captain Fiction”), this biography examines the influential writer’s other tumultuous and nourishing relationships. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Yours Ever: People and Their Letters by Thomas Mallon
There are those too young to remember, but people once communicated with each other at length, on paper. This smart and charming tour of the craft introduces us to great letter-writers through the ages. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Rose Alley by Jeremy M. Davies
In this inventive novel, which unfolds against the backdrop of the 1968 student riots in Paris, a cast and crew struggle (and fail) to complete a film set in the 17th century. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
The formerly precocious author of fiction tries his hand at polemic in this lament about our reliance on factory farming. Foer’s tone and sometimes facile arguments undermine his stronger moments, which are unsettling but not groundbreaking. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet
In these brief, daring stories, humans (many of them famous; Edison, Carter, Chomsky, etc.) search the animal world for a fundamental communion. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller
A new biography tells the captivating story of how the most famous defender of selfishness, an avowed atheist, wrote novels that were treated as bibles and became a mercurial god to her own disciples. READ MORE >

Reviewed: A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein
In this unsettling novel, a father tries to keep his son and a young woman with a troubled past apart — with terrible consequences. READ MORE >

Reviewed: The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History by John Ortved
Focusing mostly on the show’s groundbreaking and beloved early years, this oral history makes up for a certain lack of access with nerdy fervor. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece by Declan Kiberd
If you think that James Joyce’s epic novel was written for academics or that it’s impenetrable or that it has nothing to say to the average reader, Declan Kiberd asks you to think again. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Love and Summer by William Trevor
William Trevor should be on any short list of the greatest living writers. In his latest, an amateur photographer and the wife of a farmer conduct a gentle affair in mid-century Ireland. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Mantel’s latest novel, winner of the Booker Prize, is a masterpiece, a rich and nuanced portrait of Thomas Cromwell, the adviser to Henry VIII whose natural political abilities allowed him (for a time) to navigate the treacherous waters of royal favor. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Cheerful Money by Tad Friend
A staff writer for The New Yorker has produced a winning memoir — with a few frustrating omissions — about the social decline of his family’s people: The WASPs. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius by Colin Dickey
In the 19th century, phrenology, the theory that personality and talent could be discerned from the shape of one’s skull, gained prominence. After that, no celebrity’s skull, no matter how long buried, was safe. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle
In eight stories ranging from very good to timelessly great, Lydia Peelle writes with big heart and subtle humor about the lives of rural and just-this-side-of-rural Americans. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Bite the Hand That Feeds You by Henry Fairlie
Henry Fairlie believed that “politics does not exist apart from opposition.” His own beliefs were hard to pin down — a self-described conservative, he loathed Reagan and admired FDR. This collection affirms his status as one of the very best political essayists. READ MORE >

Reviewed: The Magicians by Lev Grossman
Quentin Coldwater, the protagonist of a novel that will be called “Harry Potter for grown-ups” approximately a billion times, learns that becoming a wizard is intellectually taxing, sometimes traumatic work. But reading his story is an enchanting breeze. READ MORE >

Reviewed: That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo
That Old Cape Magic follows Jack Griffin, who is trying to bury (or at least make peace with) his past and salvage his present. It isn’t Russo’s best, but it still provides a dose of his confident voice and his contemplative, tender worldview. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
When literary heavyweights turn to the crime genre, the results aren’t often pretty. But Thomas Pynchon, one of the heaviest of all, manages to finish this charming, goofy tale with his trademarks intact. READ MORE >

Reviewed: It’s Beginning to Hurt by James Lasdun
In these stories, united by their author’s elegant and incisive prose, characters grapple with crises of every sort, from failing marriages to failed careers to faulty health.
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Reviewed: The Way Home by George Pelecanos
For the better part of two decades, George Pelecanos has written terrific crime novels. In the latest, his urge to critique and moralize takes away from his portrait of the human beings at the center of the story. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Cooperstown Confidential by Zev Chafets
A new book about baseball’s Hall of Fame builds an argument that steroid use shouldn’t be a barrier to gaining entry — in fact, it should be embraced as the latest way of getting ahead. READ MORE >

Reviewed: The Essays of Leonard Michaels by Leonard Michaels
After his death in 2003, the fiction of Leonard Michaels was reissued and newly appreciated. Now comes a group of essays as sharp and provocative as the fiction. In dealing with the power of language, the necessity of imagination and the influence of family, these pieces blur the distinction between the personal and the critical. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Four Freedoms by John Crowley
John Crowley is best known for erudite fantasies, but his new novel is set at a bomber plant in Oklahoma during World War II, where ordinary Americans come together to be transformed by work and community. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Do Not Deny Me by Jean Thompson
Jean Thompson returns with another strong collection of darkly comic stories about everything from financial scams to midlife crises to the occasional allure of psychics. READ MORE >

Reviewed: The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys by Lilian Pizzichini
This biography of Jean Rhys tends toward pop psychology and melodrama, but the details of the writer’s life — her tumultuous childhood, her many lovers, and her spare, brilliant novels — remain fascinating. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon
Aleksandar Hemon’s work has always been concerned with bridging personal and cultural distances. In this strong new collection, his characters have a harder time doing it than ever before.
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Reviewed: Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
In the spare follow-up to his universally acclaimed fictional portrait of Henry James, Colm Tóibín lowers his always delicate voice yet another register to capture the life of a young Irish immigrant in 1950s Brooklyn. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Nothing Right by Antonya Nelson
Like most of us, the characters in these stories by Antonya Nelson, an all-star of the form, go through life hoping for dramatic change — but spend most of their time coping with the way things stay the same. READ MORE >

Reviewed: La Culture en clandestins. L’UX by “Lazar Kunstmann”
Over many years, a group in Paris that calls itself UX has restored a giant clock, infiltrated government buildings to perform theater inside and fixed up many of the city’s vast underground spaces — all without anyone knowing. Jon Lackman sat down with the group’s leader to discuss the mystery. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Once a Runner by John L. Parker, Jr.
Once a Runner, a cult classic long hard to find and now reissued, has been called “the best novel ever written about running,” but that may say more about the sport’s literature (and the sport’s very nature) than about this book. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Gabriel García Márquez: A Life by Gerald Martin
Written with the approval — if not the strenuous cooperation — of its subject, this biography illuminates the life, work, and many self-made mysteries of a literary giant. READ MORE >

Reviewed: As They See ‘Em by Bruce Weber
In this entertaining, Plimpton-esque chronicle of an author’s immersion in a sporting subculture, Bruce Weber tries to do the impossible: Make umpires sympathetic. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer
In Geoff Dyer’s latest, two narrators seek transcendence in very different ways. The result is a beautifully observed, provocatively ambiguous novel. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Selected Poems by Thom Gunn
This wisely chosen selection of snapshots from Gunn’s career shows the brilliant poet equally at home with traditional forms and bold new experiences. READ MORE >

Reviewed: Don’t Cry by Mary Gaitskill
Most renowned for the more provocative elements of her stories, Mary Gaitskill’s latest collection makes even clearer the compassion and familial concerns that are also her great strengths.

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