John Sayles’s A Moment in the Sun is a multivisaged portrait of our United States at the turn of the twentieth century—time of bully imperialism (democracy exported to Cuba and the Philippines with the aid of Krag rifles), Tammany politics, and Jim Crow. At more than nine hundred pages, Sayles’s canvas is grand, his chosen epoch fascinatingly alien to, not to mention sadly similar to, our own. It’s a brutal picaresque complete with melancholy whores, militaristic robber barons, desperate cutthroat prospectors, and puppet soldiers. Plenty of sorrow to go round!

Near the beginning of Swiss writer Peter Stamm’s bleak new novel, Seven Years, ten-year-old Sophie innocently asks for someone to fetch her a glass of orange juice at the gallery opening her parents, Alex and Sonia, have taken her to. Irritated, Alex snaps at his daughter and tells her to stop ordering people around. Sonia, as annoyed with her husband as he is with Sophie, mutters, “I wonder who she gets it from.” The exchange sounds unremarkable, the sort of occasional bitchiness that might pass between a pair of people like Alex and Sonia, married for a decade and a

In an interview published in the winter 2010 issue of the Paris Review, Jonathan Franzen said to Stephen Burn, “I’ve never felt less self-consciously preoccupied with language than I did when I was writing Freedom. Over and over again, as I was producing chapters, I said to myself, ‘This feels nothing like the writing I did for twenty years—this just feels transparent.’” Franzen added that this struck him as “a good sign”—an indication that he was “pressing language more completely into the service of providing transparent access to the stories I was telling and to the characters in those stories.”

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Pain is private, and its privacy has long been a subject of interest to philosophers. Wittgenstein famously compared pain to a beetle in a box: “No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.” When we talk about pain, we have to take one another’s word for it—that we are talking about the same thing, or indeed that we have beetles in our boxes at all. But what if there were a way to look into a stranger’s box and actually see his suffering?

It should come as little surprise that the first novel by Justin Taylor, who in 2007 edited an anthology of doomsday scenarios called The Apocalypse Reader, is all about religion and anarchy. What’s more surprising, perhaps, is that it is also a paean to Gainesville, Florida, circa 1999. Indeed, the book follows its characters with an almost Google Maps specificity as they wander that city’s streets and scrounge through dumpsters. Taylor’s knowledge of dark corners is a plus, because The Gospel of Anarchy explores the no-man’s-land between college kids and townies: the hidden spaces of dropouts, punks, visionaries, and addicts.

When Karen Russell’s first book, the story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, was published in 2006, it was hailed as dazzling, confident, and inventive. But another adjective has been applied to the author herself: young. Granta listed her among its Best Young American Novelists, and she was featured last summer in the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” issue of America’s best younger fiction writers. (Russell will turn thirty later this year.) Now her novel has arrived, packaged as another precocious early accomplishment.

Imagine if the most cunning and cosmopolitan poet of our era—John Ashbery, say—were a progressive US senator from a small state far from Los Angeles, New York, or Washington, along the lines of Bernie Sanders. Envision, too, that this poet/politician hides out in the margins of his poems, such that his angle on any subject, philosophical, religious, or political, atomizes into irreconcilable fragments—except that he also writes fierce, polemical pamphlets, though often without signing his name to them, and maneuvers under threat of exposure and censure. Consider that he has no fixed abode; vanishes abroad, after the fashion of Valerie

“It was by taking novels seriously in my youth that I learned to take life seriously,” writes Orhan Pamuk in The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist, a book based on the Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 2009. Fewer and fewer readers still seem to approach fiction in this spirit, not just as an entertainment but as a vale of soul-making, and the power of Pamuk’s short book lies less in his theorizing about the novel than in his professions of faith in it. That faith is all the stronger, perhaps, because Pamuk—who won the Nobel Prize in 2006—did