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.”

On the morning of November 21, 1811, Heinrich von Kleist and his terminally ill friend Henriette Vogel strolled to the shore of the Wannsee, near Berlin, and carried out a suicide pact. A passerby had seen them moments earlier, walking hand in hand, apparently in gay spirits. A few days before, the thirty-four-year-old Kleist had sent his cousin Marie a letter in which he described his life as “the most tormented that any human being has ever lived,” and on the morning of his death he wrote to his half-sister, Ulrike: “The truth is that no one could really help

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

Tiphanie Yanique’s How to Escape from a Leper Colony is a skillfully crafted collection of short stories that offer ample rewards—vivid characterizations, evocative language—at their finish lines.

There’s probably not a living American writer who has so comprehensively mined the comic possibilities of that particular anguished, hapless combination of the overeducated and the underachieving as Sam Lipsyte. Against all odds, his heroes refuse to succeed, and they and we are rewarded with the endlessly entertaining spectacle of their nonstop humiliation.

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

“We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. . . . We thought moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. Doing something with the handicapped or working with our hands.” So begins Joshua Ferris’s much-anticipated debut novel, Then We Came to the End, an amusing satire about a collection of artists and writers working at a downsizing ad agency. As the first Internet boom wanes, they fumble to devise a series of pro bono advertisements for a breast-cancer organization