J. W. Mccormack
The austerity of painting stripped down to reveal the threadbare lives of the artists; domestic strife heighted to the point of sublimity; personal memoir caressed by the ancient lunacy of myth; comic-book characters trespassing at the gates of high modernism; the love of books and cats. Frederic Tuten’s trajectory through letters has been uncategorizable, heteroclite, and consistently at odds with the prevailing fashion—so much so that he comes across less as a member of any extant school of literature and more as a Dada or Pop artist who happens to work primarily with words. His new story collection, The Bar 
Diane Cook’s debut collection, Man V. Nature, strikes a disarming balance between quirk and claustrophobic sadness. In the opening story, a woman is removed from the house she shared with her late husband and taken to a shelter for widows and divorcées that, with its barbwire fences, is essentially a prison. Forced to take part in “moving on” seminars, the residents are denied even private expression of their grief as they wait to be assigned a new husband. In form, “Moving On” could be by one of Cook’s fellow social surrealists: Aimee Bender, George Saunders, or Steven Millhauser, all clear 
“The ensuing is the report of one Detective Helen Tame. I am Helen Tame, the ensuing is my report, and it is not true that this second sentence adds nothing to the first.” So begins Personae, the second novel by Sergio De La Pava. Whereas the famous sleuths of golden-age television and airport mystery novels were preeminently concerned with justice, Detective Tame’s obsession with “Truth in its multifarious instantiations,” and her infatuation with this capital-T subject goes well beyond the letter of the law. Tame’s report, concerning the apparent murder of a 111-year-old Colombian writer named Antonio Arce, “ensues” for 
Early in Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space, a Bulgarian football referee–turned-refugee named Anton Markov wonders “how it fits together, how it’s all connected.” In this case, the question is leveled at the twisty network of organ thefts, art forgeries, and black-market lemonade sales that make up the criminal syndicate to which Anton has been indentured. But the same could be asked of this book’s intricate story lines: the circuitous trajectory that Anton’s former neighbor Nick Boardman charts through the Prague art world on the eve of Czechoslovakia’s split into two republics, or of the Byzantine painting that Nick’s flatmate, Ivan,