Joshua Ferris’s fiction reverses the daily grind—characters wake up at the office and gradually wind their way home, to a place they wouldn’t have recognized at the beginning of the day. His novels are meditations on labor and alienation in contemporary America, stocked with characters for whom life is a disease at once mediated, ameliorated, and worsened by work. Ferris’s debut, Then We Came to the End (2007), about the decline of a loopy bunch of passive employees at an ad agency, is part of a continuum that emerged first in television shows and movies, starting with Mike Judge’s 1999

Georges Perec was the author of crossword puzzles, which might lead one to assume that his literary works likewise have solutions. But to say his most famous novel, La Disparition (A Void [1969]), written without the letter e, is solved by its premise is to dismiss its puzzling qualities as literature. His book of dreams, La Boutique Obscure, illuminates a conundrum at the heart of Perec’s project: Dreams, despite a plethora of clues, do not have solutions. They are all clue. Or as Perec writes, describing one of these dreams, “From far away, it looks like there is a nearly

In How Literature Saved My Life, David Shields argues for a pastiche, or collage form, in the personal essay. The logic is that a personal essay represents real life, which occurs in bits, pieces, interruptions, associations, contingencies, and the best-laid plans—and so the writing about real life should represent the battle between chaos and order. If that’s a fair argument, then how does it apply to the fiction of pastiche? Fiction is not answerable to real life, and so what is the point, exactly, of mirroring life’s chaos?

My Struggle,the celebrated six-volume novel (or memoir) by the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, is—like nearly all grand endeavors—one of those books that shouldn’t work, but somehow does. He finished the project in 2009 in his adopted homeland, Sweden, where it was both a best seller and a lightning rod for literary debate. Three volumes have now been translated in the United States. The novel draws explicitly from Knausgaard’s own life—the narrator is named Karl Ove Knausgaard—and uses the real names of his wife, children, parents, and friends. Nearly four thousand pages, it is packed with the kind of quotidian

When Lydia Davis won the 2013 Man Booker International Prize, the attempt to fix a label to her work reduced one of the judges, professor Sir Christopher Ricks, to a bit of flailing. “Lydia Davis’s writings fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind,” he fretted. “Just how to categorize them? Should we simply concur with the official title and dub them stories? Or perhaps miniatures? Anecdotes? Essays? Jokes? Parables? Fables? Texts? Aphorisms, or even apothegms? Prayers, or perhaps wisdom literature? Or might we settle for observations?” Personally, I’m not sure what the problem with just calling her

There is a particular form of low-lying corruption that you learn to live with if you belong to certain kinds of cities. They are sprawling, chaotic, overpopulated places whose residents claim what space they can around tentacles of unplanned roads and a pandemonium of traffic. Their various nuclei are government buildings that comprise long corridors and annexes that are navigated like a maze; systems that take you back and forth from one point to another, one counter to the next, one officer to another, who may or may not sign your paper before telling you to go elsewhere. He gives

Early on in Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s big, moving, deeply provocative new novel, Ifemelu, a Nigerian attending college in Philadelphia, goes shopping. She is accompanied by a friend from childhood who has lived in the United States for several years. When she goes to pay, Ifemelu’s friend cannot remember the name of the saleswoman who assisted her. “Was it the one with long hair?” the cashier asks. Both saleswomen have long hair. “The one with dark hair?” Both have dark hair. Afterward Ifemelu wonders, “Why didn’t she just ask ‘Was it the black girl or the white girl?’” Her friend

As a young literatus in training, I got myself early and often to the Lion’s Head, a legendary and now-extinct writers’ bar on Sheridan Square. Lined with the framed covers of books by its denizens, it offered an atmosphere of boozy bonhomie and the opportunity for literary stargazing of a special sort. (Hey, I’m urinating right next to Fred Exley!) And it didn’t take long before I was told that gin mill’s trademark anecdote: A nonscribbling civilian drops into the Lion’s Head for a couple of beers. After taking in the scene for a while, he remarks to the guy

Marcos Giralt Torrente’s short-story collection The End of Love is haunted by an ellipsis. There it is in the first story, “We Were Surrounded by Palm Trees,” right where the eye rests, intervening with a pause before we’ve even read the opening lines: “. . . I remember when it started. There is one scene that comes back to me, frequently, though it seems arbitrary to focus on it.” The scene our narrator fixates on—hesitantly, with the attention, it seems, of a writer—takes place on an unnamed island in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Africa. It is familiar

For quite some time now, Mohsin Hamid has been chipping away at the shape of the novel, testing out the ways form, structure, and narration can be manipulated to set in relief the story he wants to tell. In Moth Smoke (2000), his debut novel about a banker in Lahore on a downward spiral of violence and drugs, Hamid worked into his gritty portrait of Pakistan an allegorical story line about the internecine struggle for succession to the imperial throne in seventeenth-century Mughal India. The deployment of this historical material did not always sit well with Hamid’s deft portrayal of