As befits a well-practiced and much-lauded controversialist, Michel Houellebecq’s novel The Map and the Territory first incited a mini-hubbub over plagiarism upon its publication last year in France, then went on to win the Prix Goncourt. The lifted sections (as Houellebecq readily acknowledged) were from Wikipedia: long swaths of unremarkable factoids about things you’re probably not interested in reading about, like houseflies. If you find the whole pomo-pastiche thing a little tedious, there are other pleasures to be had, since a depressed, dyspeptic, and controversial writer named Michel Houellebecq gets gruesomely murdered in the second half of the book. The

In 2008, I attended a lecture Gary Lutz delivered to a packed room at Columbia University. We were there to hear the consummate wordsmith and student of Gordon Lish say something memorable about the primacy of sentences. And he did. He spoke of words “behaving” as if they were destined to be together. He spoke of combinations of words that were so worked over by the author that they could not be improved on and were preparing themselves for “infinity.” But when it came to stories overall, Lutz had only this to say: “I almost never start with even a

In Sweden, according to Lars Arffssen’s recent novel, “Nordic Dullness Syndrome” affects millions. The country’s mores are hard to parse: While “semi-consensual intercourse with a drowsy woman” constitutes a despicable crime, its citizens conduct adulterous affairs so nonchalantly that the husband is often sitting in the same room, distracted by his iPad. The book’s delirious plotlines extend to an IKEA-like company’s shadowy past, but the central mystery gets announced early on: “Why would anyone want to decapitate an unpublished author of Swedish thrillers?”

Alex Shakar’s first novel, The Savage Girl, is a biting satire of ’90s culture set in an alternate-universe Manhattan (“Middle City”) built on the side of a volcano. At a beverage mogul’s house party, professional “trendspotters” Ursula Van Urden and Javier Delreal notice a screen saver that animates apocalypse scenarios: Middle City leveled by natural disasters, pummeled by a Godzilla/King Kong tag team, vaporized by an atom bomb, floating away when gravity fails, crushed by “the sandaled foot of God.” The city is endlessly obliterated, restored, destroyed anew. The Savage Girl had the singular misfortune of being published on September

Patti Smith shoplifted a volume of his poems and found revelation. Jim Morrison earnestly corresponded with his English translator. On first reading the work, Bob Dylan reports that “bells went off.” Throw in Salinger, Dylan Thomas, and most of the Beats, and you’ve got a good idea of Arthur Rimbaud’s enduring fan base: rebels besotted with language. That all of these rockers and writers fell in love with the author when they were adolescents or just a little older is no surprise—the French Symbolist wrote all of his legendary poems before turning twenty-one. But Rimbaud’s heroic stature has always posed

Dana Spiotta’s third novel opens with a pair of sentences that contain the DNA for the book as a whole, initiating its portrayal of the complicated bond between two siblings and its meditation on how these characters present their memories to themselves and to each other. “She always said it started, or became apparent to her, when their father bought him a guitar for his tenth birthday,” the book begins. “At least that was the family legend, burnished into a shared over-memory.” The “she” of the first sentence is Stone Arabia’s forty-seven-year-old protagonist, Denise Kranis. The guitar recipient is her

Jo Ann Beard is primarily known as a writer of that somewhat stigmatized genre, creative nonfiction. But what is creative nonfiction? How does it differ from the ineffably hipper “new journalism”? Same reliance on the stylistic techniques of fiction, but no facts, only memories and musings? Is “creative nonfiction” just the academy’s mask for much-maligned memoir? For the fact is, those graduating from an MFA program like the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, as Beard did in 1994, will likely need a day job. Beard, for one, became managing editor of the university’s space-physics quarterly. She liked the comfort

It might seem, on opening A Fast Life, that Tim Dlugos was born fully formed from the head of Frank O’Hara. Dlugos was undeniably an original, but his sophistication and finesse—acquired while he was still a student at La Salle College and immersing himself in the work of the New York School poets—showed from the very beginning, when he started writing at the age of twenty in 1970. His collected poems reveal no big stylistic breaks, no eureka moment when the poet turns the corner from juvenilia to maturity, but rather a continuous deepening of a consistent aesthetic. His life,