The Kim Jong Il that we meet in Adam Johnson’s second novel, set in North Korea, is no cartoon villain, no Team America marionette. He’s a three-dimensional character—a hairsprayed, jumpsuited, hopping-mad monomaniac, sure, but a man in whom we can recognize some of our own jealousies and desires. And although he is offstage more often than not in The Orphan Master’s Son, Dear Leader, as he’s usually referred to, is omnipresent in every conversation, every moment of intimacy, every sorrow that takes place somewhere in this fictional DPRK. He’s the glue holding together not just an entire totalitarian nation, but

The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941–1956, volume 2 of a projected four-part compendium, is an endless Chinese banquet at which all but the most determined gourmands are likely to feel stuffed somewhere between the crispy pig ears and the thousand-year eggs: Some may thrill to the hairpin turns and daredevil high jinks involved in the translation of Molloy from French into English, but many with more than a glancing interest in Beckett may find by page 200 or so that his correspondence and its staggeringly detailed footnotes have, to torture a phrase from Jane Austen, delighted them quite enough for

David Cox, A Street in Harborne. A new novel by Peter Cameron doesn’t do much to announce itself as a literary event. His books are short—only one, The City of Your Final Destination, is longer than three hundred pages—and are not consciously “brainy.” Their chief literary virtues are wit, charm, and lightness of touch, qualities […]

It says something about the bewildering reality in the contemporary US that a speculative novelist like Steve Erickson—who has written novels about a dominatrix oracle who makes God her submissive (Our Ecstatic Days, 2005) and a film editor who finds evidence of a primordial scene cached in the frames of a spectrum of movies (Zeroville, 2007)—would spin a variation on the hoary maxim about truth outstripping fiction. In These Dreams of You, Alexander Nordhoc, a frustrated novelist known as Zan, reflects on Bush, the Iraq war, and our black Hawaiian president: “It’s science fiction. . . . Or at least

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,

Madeleine L’Engle’s 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time—one of the best-loved and best-selling children’s books of the past sixty years—was initially rejected by at least two dozen publishers. The story goes that later on, whenever L’Engle attended a literary event, she would carry the rejection letters in her purse. If editors happened to mention to her that they regretted not having had the chance to publish the book, she would whip out the proof that they had passed it up. Like most good stories, this one is probably apocryphal. But it ought to be true, not only because of its

Like a science-fiction time traveler or the radio character Chandu the Magician, Satantango is an entity with multiple—or at least two—coequal manifestations, a monument of late-twentieth-century cinema and a modern Hungarian literary classic. There is Satantango the mind-boggling seven-and-a-half-hour movie by director Béla Tarr, and there is Satantango the legendary novel by the movie’s screenwriter László Krasznahorkai, published in 1985 but only now translated into English.