The sixty-year interval between Henry Roth’s first novel, Call It Sleep (1934), and his second, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park (1994), constitutes the longest intermission in any significant American literary career. In the final decade of his life, Roth overcame severe depression and agonizing rheumatoid arthritis to produce a veritable Niagara of prose—about five thousand manuscript pages. Roth’s assistant, Felicia Steele, and editor, Robert Weil, sculpted three thousand of those into the tetralogy Mercy of a Rude Stream, which was published sequentially starting in 1994. Roth died in 1995, at eighty-nine, before seeing the final two volumes, From

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.

In an interview with The Onion in 2007, Yann Martel gave an unlikely description of his work in progress. It would be a book in two parts, he explained, a novel and an essay “published back-to-back, upside down, what the trade calls a flipbook. In other words, a book with two covers. And they’ll have the same title: ‘A 20th-Century Shirt.’ They share the same fundamental metaphor to do with the shirt and to do with the laundry, and they both have to do with the Holocaust.”

Jennifer Gilmore’s Something Red opens in the summer of 1979. The hostage crisis in Iran will soon play out; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is imminent. The political stakes are high, but passions are dulled. The Summer of Love and Freedom Summer are dusty memories. Kent State has become a legal settlement. Jimmy Carter, overwhelmed by the nation’s “crisis of confidence,” sits down in the Oval Office to describe the country’s malaise.

Adam Thirlwell loves to write about sex. It’s is the central activity in The Escape, upholstered—like everything else in this allusive, philosophical, melancholy comedy—in mock-heroic chutzpah. Thirlwell’s word choices are showy, his phrasing bravura: “They had sat in the rose garden, in the pale sunshine, a police siren tumescing and detumescing in the background. . . . A tree was leafing through itself, anxiously.”

Fernanda Eberstadt grew up on Park Avenue, in a wealthy bohemian family that threw parties attended by the likes of Jackie Kennedy. Recalling her childhood home, she wrote in the New York Observer, “There was a gold Andy Warhol Marilyn in the living room and an alabaster statue of a panther from a Greek temple.” She published her first book at twenty-five, and her novels chronicled a Manhattan that counterposed intelligence and money in a most delicious way. Eberstadt specialized in witty, sharply observed class collisions, such as the love affair in The Furies (2003) between uptown highflier Gwen and

They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide,” begins John Banville’s Booker Prize–winning novel, The Sea (2005). As its reader soon discovers, these departing gods are mere mortals, albeit ones who hold such sway over the narrator’s heart, mind, and life that they seem to him of a higher order. The Sea’s successor, The Infinities, also begins with gods, though this time they are no figure of speech.

When the first editor’s note appears early in Macedonio Fernández’s The Museum of Eterna’s Novel, you aren’t quite sure it wasn’t written by the author in one of his alternate guises. But this is only the beginning of such playfulness. To American readers, Macedonio is not the household name that his former student and self-confessed plagiarist, Borges, has become. Yet his works circle, gambol, and swerve in an eminently familiar way. Macedonio stands (or more likely cartwheels) at the beginning of the Ultraist literary movement that made Borges possible, and his impact on the young Argentinean writer, as well as