Benjamin Anastas
The Clinton Hill brownstone where Kathleen Alcott’s second novel, Infinite Home (2015), is largely set is about as far away from the Apollo program’s Lunar Module—Lem, in NASA-speak—as fictional territory can be. Edith, the elderly landlord of this neglected five-unit dream factory, hasn’t raised the rent in fourteen years and lives in closer communion with the neighborhood’s past than its multi-racial, gentrifying present; the tenants are eccentrics with maladies and psychic wounds that make it impossible for them to traffic in the world outside. One night, when Edith wanders disoriented into the stairwell, they all gather around to try and Early on in Javier Marías’s reputation-galvanizing novel A Heart So White (1992), the narrator, Juan, lies awake on his honeymoon in Havana listening to a couple argue in the hotel room next door. The man on the other side of the wall is a Spaniard, like Juan, and he has a wife back in Madrid; the woman is his tough-talking Cuban mistress. They seem to be hashing out a plot to murder the Spaniard’s wife. Juan’s new bride, Luisa, is also eavesdropping from bed, but she pretends to be asleep. Both Juan and Luisa work as translators at diplomatic congresses 
Marcos Giralt Torrente’s short-story collection The End of Love is haunted by an ellipsis. There it is in the first story, “We Were Surrounded by Palm Trees,” right where the eye rests, intervening with a pause before we’ve even read the opening lines: “. . . I remember when it started. There is one scene that comes back to me, frequently, though it seems arbitrary to focus on it.” The scene our narrator fixates on—hesitantly, with the attention, it seems, of a writer—takes place on an unnamed island in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Africa. It is familiar Once upon a time, Ian McEwan was content to snare readers with his literary gamesmanship and stun them into submission with his talent for revealing the unsettling and irresistibly deviant appetites that undergird life. Thanks to early books like First Love, Last Rites (1975), The Cement Garden (1978), and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) and their tightly plotted agonies of flesh and mind, the press gave McEwan the nickname Ian Macabre. While the exact point of progression is arguable, ever since his missing-child epic, The Child in Time (1987), McEwan has undertaken a much larger, more ambitious project with his