In her 2008 essay “Two Paths for the Novel,” Zadie Smith devised an antagonism between Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, as an example of pious literary realism, and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, a whorl of reflux lodged in that tradition’s throat. As Smith saw it, Netherland indulged in the fantasies of the coherent self, with his or her explicable arcs toward epiphany. Remainder—in which a nameless narrator, newly wealthy, stages increasingly elaborate reenactments of made-up scenes from his past—signed up with an alternative literary tradition, with an altogether different way to view the self: not as a contained entity but as a behaviorist

The Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra was born in 1975, two years after the violent military coup that ousted Chile’s democratically elected, Socialist president, Salvador Allende. It would be impossible to overstate the shattering impact of that coup, not only on Chile but on the entire Left in Latin America. It was the darkest event in one of South America’s darkest decades.

The best parts of Richard Powers’s new novel sound like many of the best parts of his other ten novels, which is to say that they don’t sound like novels at all: They are lyrical, serious explications of difficult, technical, even academic subjects, with plenty of real-world examples and proper nouns—put there for readers who don’t know the subject already—along with allusions, brushed over the top like icing, for readers who do. These passages not only explain complicated phenomena—how DNA shapes life by shaping proteins (The Gold Bug Variations), how programmers create neural networks (Galatea 2.2), how corporations grow and

In several recent novels the succinct, startling prose of Jean Echenoz has achieved the condition of a highly durable, transparent membrane, something like the trompe l’oeil mesh often used now to mask scaffolding on building facades under repair. Imposing a Beckettian principle that drastically less is immensely more, Echenoz summons a fulsome picture of his characters and their worlds with a scattering of surgically exact, granular details both irreproachably veracious and wildly defamiliarizing, such as the swarm of mosquitoes that attacks the protagonist of I’m Gone (1999) as his dogsled approaches the Arctic Circle: Yes, there is a mosquito problem

How much less violence we would do to our lives, Rachel Cusk’s eighth novel suggests, if we could bear disenchantment. Outline is composed mainly of conversations between the narrator, Faye, and the people she meets in Athens, where she’s teaching a summer writing course. Through the stories told to Faye by strangers, acquaintances, and friends, Cusk illustrates how the “principle of progress” causes people to destroy what they have in their search for the next thing. One man attributes the end of his marriage to him and his wife’s running out of mutual goals to accomplish (house, children, travel): “If

Aristotle thought all stories must have a beginning, a middle, and an end; the novels of David Mitchell begin and end so often they can seem like all middle. Critics have called Mitchell a stylist. In fact, he is a structuralist. His first novel has nine narrators. His second has three false starts, signposts for the maze to come. His third, Cloud Atlas (2004), is the most elaborate—six plots, four continents, eleven chapters. The plots interlock, and the chapters mirror each other. It is the apex, and possibly the ceiling, of the Mitchell method. People and problems recur, a chase

In 2011 Ben Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was brought out by Coffee House Press, a Minneapolis independent, to wide and deserving if improbable praise. Improbable because of its provenance, but more so because its author, thirty-two at the time, was already a decorated poet, with three collections and a National Book Award nomination to his name. There are in recent memory American poets who write novels—from John Ashbery and James Schuyler to Forrest Gander and Joyelle McSweeney—but crossover success, measured in terms of attention paid by organs like the New Yorker and the New York Times, is

Emily Gould bolted to local media fame seven years ago as a Gawker blogger. She wrote scathing posts about writers, celebrities, and anyone else who happened to come in for online scrutiny on a given day. She was funny. She was reckless. She was really good at being really mean. She was twentysomething and photogenic, and when she appeared on CNN, Jimmy Kimmel told her she had a decent chance of going to hell. I met her around this time at an event she was covering at the New York Public Library, and the first thing she said to me

Think of history as a piano: an austere, glossy model that invites and intimidates whoever’s looking for revelations from its keyboard. A sensibility oriented toward fact is sufficient background to tease out a few notes into a simple, logical pattern. And if you have a surfeit of facts and can season them with nuance, the audience should end up nestled in your hip pocket. But facts can only do so much, especially if they’re slippery or cloaked in shadows. When that happens, the music can become static, even inert. So you shift tactics, go for broke, make a few educated