Eric Benson
Leonardo Padura’s The Man Who Loved Dogs arrives in English translation already heralded as a historically significant work. Padura, the most successful Cuban novelist who has chosen to remain in the country, has become one of the foremost interpreters of life on the island today. “For Cuba’s intellectuals, and for its professional class, a new Padura book is as much a document as a novel, a way of understanding Cuban reality,” wrote Jon Lee Anderson in a New Yorker profile last October. But the impact of The Man Who Loved Dogs, which was published in Cuba in 2009 and is 
Professor Borges, a transcription of a British literature survey course the Argentine fabulist taught in the fall of 1966, is the kind of volume that gets published only if a scholar is canonical, inspires cultish devotion, and, almost certainly, is long dead. The twenty-five lectures that make up the book are ostensibly introductory, but they’re only masquerading as English 101. Instead, this is Borges’s highly idiosyncratic tour of his favorite authors and most revered myths, a view of history and literature as filtered through his capacious, whimsical mind. 
Has a novel ever been more aptly titled than J. M. Ledgard’s Submergence? From the opening pages, we’re reminded relentlessly that “submergence,” “submersion,” “sinking,” “diving,” and “descent” are very much what this painstakingly crafted book is about. It’s a thematic obsession that ties together philosophical synopses, historical anecdotes, essayistic meditations, two central characters, and three interwoven plots. Submergence is plainly a novel of grand ambitions—a brooding, atmospheric spy tale that wants to say something about science, religion, and destiny. Unfortunately, it too often confuses mantra with meaning. Repeating “the depths” over and over again can be mesmerizing, but it doesn’t 
Tom Wolfe’s new novel, Back to Blood, opens with a bravura prologue that seems to promise the sharp-witted, delightfully overblown Tom Wolfe novel we’ve been awaiting. A Yalie and Wolfe stand-in named Edward T. Topping IV (“White Anglo-Saxon Protestant to the maximum, to the point of satire”) has just moved from respectable Chicago to steamy South Florida to take over as editor in chief of the Miami Herald. On a night out with his equally WASPy wife, Mac, the couple gets slapped in their prim-and-proper faces by their newly adopted fire-blooded city. Topping and Mac have just found a parking