Zadie Smith’s Swing Time is light by design but as powerful as its predecessor, NW. Where that book vaulted a reader down the block, Swing Time carries you gently to a finish that is bloodless and brutal. The two novels are siblings, rooted in the same slice of northwest London, though Swing Time casts out into New York and West Africa. Themes found in all of Smith’s novels appear: the clash between various Anglophone cultures; a friendship falling out of alignment when only one of the friends hits the big time; and the ways people use each other as markers

One night in Naples a number of years ago, the mother of an old friend who’d recently expatriated herself to southern Italy from Florence invited us over for a small dinner party. A worldly and glamorous figure under normal circumstances, that night she had her arm in a sling and apologized repeatedly for her cooking handicap. She pressed us giddily on our visit to Naples: the mysterious city built in layers on a dramatically swooping volcanic landscape, filled with bridal shops and treasures of Western civilization neglected in dusty museums, yet seething with hidden, menacing systems of power. Had we

Shirley Jackson’s legacy might not seem in need of assistance. Fifty-one years after her death, nearly all of her books are in print, and her most celebrated works—“The Lottery,” possibly America’s most famous short story, and the novels The Haunting of Hill House, twice adapted for film, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, which just went into production after years of stalling (talk about sating a renewed appetite for complicated female leads!)—continue to send chills down spines. In 2010, the Library of America enlisted Joyce Carol Oates to honor Jackson with a best-of volume, and earlier this year

Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is an anatomy of American racism in the new millennium, a slender, musical book that arrives with the force of a thunderclap. It’s a sequel of sorts to Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004), sharing its subtitle (An American Lyric) and ambidextrous approach: Both books combine poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, words and images. But where Lonely was jangly and capacious, an effort to pin down the mood of a particular moment—the paranoia of post-9/11 America and the racial targeting of black and brown men in those years—Citizen’s project is more oblique, more mysterious.

“A scurvy thirst awoke him,” begins Lisa Dillman’s translation of Yuri Herrera’s new novel, The Transmigration of Bodies, as though someone had changed her settings to “English (Pirate).” It’s a deliberately confusing effect. Herrera’s short novels observe the violence of contemporary Mexico through a prism of fantasy, and their idiosyncratic language (a jumble of street chatter, high literary style, and archaic formulas) reflects their experimental form. In Signs Preceding the End of the World, he recast a narrative of illegal emigration from Mexico to America—a setting ripe for political dog-whistling and condemnation—as an underworld tale that evokes Dante’s Inferno, the

In “Fame,” one of the prose poems from A River Dies of Thirst, the last collection he published before his death in 2008, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish noted sardonically that “fame is the humiliation of a person deprived of secrets.” Darwish knew fame well; he had been acclaimed from the moment his poems first appeared, in 1960, when he was only nineteen. For the rest of his life, he would be celebrated as “the Palestinian national poet” and “the voice of his people.” One of the ironies, if not the humiliations, of such a role is that the poet

It’s late 2009 and Jen, our heroine, has fallen on hard-ish times: She has been fired from her job as communications officer at a Madoff-scuttled family foundation, where she’s been cozily ignoring her true calling (art?) since graduating from college. When she gets bored of rattling around the cardboardy apartment that she shares with her public-schoolteacher husband, Jim, in an inadequately gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood they call Not Ditmas Park, she accepts an assignment from her college friend Pam to paint some portraits. She then allows her work to be incorporated, gratis, into an upcoming installation/performance by Pam, who is an

Heroin doesn’t sound like heroine by accident. The name for the drug derives from hero, or heroes, as in the late-nineteenth-century soldiers on morphine who fought through their injuries and floated home. The same then-legal morphine was popular among women of the upper classes, who used it to socialize where drinking was considered a man’s game and to survive what they felt to be either their boredom or their subjugation, depending how woke a lady can be while she’s nodding off. Pauline Manford, the rich and inchoate lead in a middling Edith Wharton book, Twilight Sleep, refuses to soldier through

Long before college students on American or British campuses began signing up for courses in postcolonial literature, there were people from the colonies present in the imperial cities. In London Calling (2003), Sukhdev Sandhu writes that in 1900, during the “heyday of an empire often assumed to have been a foreign affair . . . black and Asian people were common sights in London: peddling religious tracts in White-chapel; walking, law books in hand, to the Inns of Court where they were students; operating on sick patients at teaching hospitals; collecting fares on the city’s omnibuses; performing as nigger minstrels