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

Lionel Shriver loves a good tragedy. In the months of soul-searching that followed the Columbine massacre, Shriver penned the Orange Prize–winning novel We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003). The epistolary thriller, narrated by a mother attempting to understand why her dislikable son went on a murderous rampage at his high school, wonders whether to blame herself or society. Or maybe he was simply a bad seed?

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.

A subtle misanthropy pervades Justin Taylor’s debut story collection, Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever. Taylor’s heroes—mostly males ranging from twitchy kids to restless thirty-somethings—are reliably uncomfortable in their own skins, embracing risk in an attempt to salvage some sense of themselves. The nameless narrator of “Jewels Flashing in the Night of Time” works in a small-town sandwich shop and offers an unnerving soliloquy about deli meat: Ham is “pink as a boiled baby and is 11 percent water and comes wrapped in this plastic with a red criss-cross design on it and when you slice it open a

“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

Somewhere between Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa and Alex Garland’s The Beach lies Mischa Berlinski’s debut novel, Fieldwork. With its exotic backdrop (the hill country of northern Thailand), dogged quest for meaning (the facts behind the mysterious murder of an American missionary), and meticulous detailing of tribal customs and anthropological facts, this unlikely marriage of page-turner and dissertation results in some clever and highly entertaining fiction.

André Aciman is our consummate Proustian. Even more than Roger Shattuck, who’s championed Proust in scholarly works, or Alain de Botton, who’s promoted Proustian self-help, Aciman has taken to heart the author’s injunction to use In Search of Lost Time as a personal darkroom—to dip the negatives of one’s own memories into the magic solution Proust provides. In his remarkable collection of essays, False Papers (2000), Aciman tells how his father first bought him Swann’s Way when he was fifteen (“I already knew I had just received, perhaps without my father’s knowing it, his dearest, most enduring gift of love”).

By the time Antinous Bellori encounters angels in what we can euphemistically call the flesh, the creatures are no longer those divine messengers familiar from the Old Testament. Nor have they yet mutated into the chubby, rosy-cheeked babies hoisting puffy clouds that Tiepolo et al. gloried in depicting. The eleven-year-old Antinous, lost in the darkening forest near his northern Italian home circa 1562, stumbles on a pair of the flickering fallen ones just as they’re sinking their bared teeth into a raw fish. The sight is horrible, more sublime than miraculous: “Their faces are white and skull-like, their eye sockets

Whatever the proximate cause, we all will die in the end, probably with pain, possibly with some alteration of self before it is over. This is no revelation. Yet depictions of the body in an off-kilter condition have been a mainstay recently, not just of the hospital dramas that dominate TV but of much fiction. The fascination is in tune with a culture that knows exponentially more about the workings of the body than has any in history but that remains, even with the technical know-how, unable to meet many challenges to it. We know so much that, it seems,