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.

Rick Moody’s latest novel is a riotous gloss on an already forgotten flourish of presidential theater: George W. Bush’s 2004 announcement that the United States would send a manned mission to Mars in the coming decades. Bush’s proposal recalled JFK’s optimistic—and fulfilled—moon-landing prediction but was transparently an election-year ploy as the war in Iraq soured; it betrayed an edginess about a new, non-American century of Chinese ascent and epochal domestic decline. Slyly taking Bush at his word, Moody imagines a 2025 NASA expedition to the Red Planet and conjures a not-so-distant future that is less a forecast of the 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 great English poet John Clare spent the last twenty-three years of his life in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum; it was his second extended stay in a madhouse. When he died there, on May 20, 1864, his poetry was virtually forgotten. After a frenzy of celebrity in the 1820s, when he was taken up by London literary society and rubbed shoulders with Coleridge, Keats, and Hazlitt, Clare soon fell victim to changing tastes: The “Peasant Poet” was no longer a novelty. By 1821, Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery had gone through four editions, but his Shepherd’s

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

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

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.”

Pearl Abraham’s fourth novel, American Taliban, is the story of an American family riven by the disappearance of a young man, John Jude Parish, into the ranks of the Taliban weeks before 9/11. Though glancingly based on the life of John Walker Lindh, the novel differs in particulars: The eighteen-year-old Parish is a popular, intellectually curious character rather than a troubled teenager, and his journey from Washington, DC, to Afghanistan feels less like a radical quest and more like a pilgrimage that ends at the wrong shrine.