Benjamin Strong
The Kim Jong Il that we meet in Adam Johnson’s second novel, set in North Korea, is no cartoon villain, no Team America marionette. He’s a three-dimensional character—a hairsprayed, jumpsuited, hopping-mad monomaniac, sure, but a man in whom we can recognize some of our own jealousies and desires. And although he is offstage more often than not in The Orphan Master’s Son, Dear Leader, as he’s usually referred to, is omnipresent in every conversation, every moment of intimacy, every sorrow that takes place somewhere in this fictional DPRK. He’s the glue holding together not just an entire totalitarian nation, but 
Life, as depicted in the pages of Marvel Comics, is full of heroes and villains. Reading Sean Howe’s new behind-the-scenes history of the venerable publishing house that brought you Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Avengers, and others, you begin to appreciate why. For although Marvel Comics: The Untold Story is a spirited account of a group of creative misfits taking on a staid industry giant, DC, and triumphing, it’s also the familiar tale of management prevailing over labor, of the suits crushing the talent. It’s the story, in other words, of how the villains won. To paraphrase the compliment Joan Didion paid Fat City, Leonard Gardner’s classic 1969 novel set in Stockton, California, Richard Lange has got it right about Los Angeles. Dead Boys, his debut story collection, depicts average Southland life with unfaltering exactitude— the doughnut shop–cum-hangout, the sun’s merciless routine, Spanglish, and the disconsolateness of the carless. Such meticulously drawn commonplace scenery is remarkable in itself. But what’s most impressive about Lange’s tales is how his LA bypasses the usual accounts of nihilism and dystopia to signify instead the hard-luck optimism of the losers who are drawn to it. For Newell Ewing, a twelve-year-old malcontent growing up in a middle-class Las Vegas subdivision, the Strip—“The neon. The halogen. The viscous liquid light”—is a bright abstraction, beads on the horizon as distant and unattainable as the moon. One Saturday evening, chaperoned by his older friend Kenny, Newell makes his first visit to the casinos. He never comes home. Charles Bock’s first novel, Beautiful Children, opens almost a year after the fateful August night Newell ran away. Befitting the confessions of its opiate-eating narrator, Nami Mun’s first novel has a junkie’s jumbled sense of chronology. Unfolding in the New York City of the 1970s and ’80s, Miles from Nowhere contains a surfeit of period references (eight-track tapes and Riunite on ice), but the narrative moves back and forth in time so fluidly that it seems to take place, as the title suggests, in a province all its own.