There is a type of casual leftist who embraces a condescending, evangelical style that I once thought belonged solely to the right wing, and that always bothered me just as much as Republican policy agenda itself. The liberal version of this style is exemplified by the rabblerousing progressive website Upworthy, which is always preaching, outraged, to the choir: “Watch this writer ask one question about equality that will blow your mind,” “Share if you believe in justice,” “Think teachers are overpaid? Read this chart.” Its readers constitute an audience that moves from one outrage to another—the rude treatment of Sandra

Can the literary novel ever really get its arms around the problem of human evil? It keeps trying — a difficult assignment for the poor beast. In any case, an undaunted Alexander Maksik has brought his skills to this very problem. His second novel, A Marker to Measure Drift, recounts a season of homeless exile in the life of a 24-year-old Liberian woman fleeing an episode of gruesome violence incidental to the overthrow of the tyrant Charles Ghankay Taylor, in 2003. Maksik has produced a bold book, and an instructive one.

Tishomingo Blues is Elmore Leonard’s thirty-seventh novel. At that number you’d think he’d be flagging, but no, the maestro is in top form. If, like Graham Greene, he were in the habit of dividing his books into “novels” and “entertainments”—with, for instance, Pagan Babies and Cuba Libre in the former list, and Glitz, Get Shorty, and Be Cool in the latter—this one might fall on the “entertainment” side; but, as with Greene, those that might be consigned to the “entertainment” section are not necessarily of poorer quality.

Donald Barthelme, according to the biography Hiding Man, offered a bold prediction one evening in 1974. His dinner companions were John Barth and Joseph McElroy, and Barthelme declared that “the smart money” was on McElroy’s novel Lookout Cartridge for the National Book Award. The smart money proved wrong; Gravity’s Rainbow took home the prize. McElroy came up short again in 1987 when he published the thousand-page opus Women and Men, a book that prompted Tom LeClair to hail its author as “the most important now writing in America.” In a career of more than half a century, McElroy has never

The first thing to say about The Art of Sleeping Alone is that it’s very French. It’s slim, chic and humorless, that is, a sophisticated bagatelle of a volume, filled with detours to exotic locales: the Sahara, Goa in India, the Greek island of Hydra.

Marisha Pessl’s first novel, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, was a maddening, twisty, eventual knockout of a book. It sparkled with showy erudition and the electricity of a true original. A prestigious, successful debut novel, it’s a tough act to follow. But here she is, in Night Film, thumbing her nose at sophomore slump.

World Literature certainly sounds like a nice idea. A literature truly global in scope ought to enlarge readers’ sympathies and explode local prejudices, releasing us from the clammy cells of provincialism to roam, in imagination, with people in faraway places and times. The aim is unimpeachable. Accordingly, nobody says a word against it at the humanities department conclaves, international book festivals, or lit-mag panel discussions where World Literature is invoked. People writing and reading in different languages (even if one language, English, predominates) about different histories and cultures and ideas: who could be against that?

For the past several weeks, pundits have been attacking Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth as something like a work of covert literary terrorism. In the week following the release of the book, the Fox News journalist John Dickerson called Aslan out for masquerading as an historian, penning what he termed a “fast-paced demolition of the core beliefs” of Christianity, and then accused the “liberal media” of endeavoring to hide Aslan’s Muslim faith. Dickerson’s piece led to an avalanche of nasty Amazon reviews and a now-famous on-air interview with Fox based on the question, “Why

In 1952, six years after publishing its first book, Farrar, Straus & Company nearly failed. Founded by Guggenheim heir Roger Straus with $360,000 from his family and friends’ interests in department stores, mining, and brewing (the former Rheingold Brewery in Brooklyn served as the warehouse for its books), the firm had printed one hundred thousand copies of Mr. President, a quasi-official selection of President Truman’s papers and photographs. As Truman’s reelection campaign began, the book looked to be a hit, but a couple weeks after its publication, Truman reversed course and announced he wouldn’t run after all—and the book sank.