Andras Lévi and his brother, Tibor, have moved from the Hungarian countryside to Budapest and are ready to start their lives. Andras heads to Paris on an architecture scholarship; Tibor hopes to study medicine in Italy. But it’s 1937 and they’re Jewish. Their plans will be interrupted.

As Gary Shteyngart’s third novel begins, Lenny Abramov is seated on a “UnitedContinentalDeltamerican” flight to New York after a year in Rome. Taking out a collection of Chekhov’s stories to pass the time, Lenny receives harsh stares from his fellow passengers. “Duder,” one tells him, “that thing smells like wet socks.” Perhaps America has changed during Lenny’s sojourn in the capital of the ancient world.

Like the mix of ingredients used to make the titular dessert in The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Aimee Bender’s novel is a blend of old-fashioned coming-of-age story and newfangled horror tale that becomes a less-than-satisfying confection about love, loss, and lunacy, and what they taste like in the preternaturally sensate mouth of one little girl. Bender, author of the story collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998) and Willful Creatures (2005) and the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000), continues to explore a predilection for a kind of American-gothic postmodern realism with the story of Rose

The giant squid/sea monster is such a science-fiction and mythological cliché that the very title of British novelist China Miéville’s eighth novel, Kraken, embraces the genre as pulpy entertainment. Running a brisk five hundred pages, Kraken follows a frenetic stretch in the life of Billy Harrow, a curator at London’s Darwin Centre of the National History Museum. One day, Billy escorts a tour group to the main attraction—a preserved Architeuthis dux—only to discover that the giant squid is missing.

Toward the end of James Schuyler’s sixty-page, long-lined meditation “The Morning of the Poem,” a voice interrupts the meandering interior monologue: “‘All he cares about are leaves and / flowers and weather.’” The remark is unattributed, but the speaker might be the poet’s mother or sister, both of whom step in and out of the poem. Regardless, he or she is different from the “you” addressed next, without even a sentence break:

A few years back, when I was regular on the mildly disreputable basic-cable show Movie Club with John Ridley, the host shared the story of how Oliver Stone pressured him not to release the pulp thriller Stray Dogs until after U-Turn, its film adaptation, came out. Stone tried to delay publication because he didn’t want it to ruin the ending of his movie. This struck Ridley as absurd. After all, no one complained that Margaret Mitchell spoiled Gone with the Wind by releasing the novel that inspired it.

The tone of Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles, the debut novel by Kira Henehan, announces itself on the title page—sonorous but disjointed, maybe a little overstuffed. Henehan’s heroine is Finley, a seasoned detective with yellow eyes and red hair cut “as straight as the edge of a page.” Finley has been assigned by her boss, a tall man named Binelli, to find Uppal, an aging professor and part-time puppet master. (Like Cher and Snooki, most of Henehan’s characters have only one name.) The nature of the assignment is never quite clear—nothing in Orion is—but Finley accepts

In his introduction to Democracy in America, that epic tale of a young country told by an aristocrat from an old one, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville predicted that many of his readers would criticize his work. His account of the New World experiment was “not precisely suited to anybody’s taste; in writing it I did not intend to serve or to combat any party; I have tried to see not differently but further than any party; while they are busy with tomorrow, I have wished to consider the whole future.” He might as well have been describing the task of