The bloody era of sectarian violence between nationalists and Unionists known as the Troubles that marked Northern Ireland from 1969 until the late ’90s comes boldly to life in Louise Dean’s astonishing second novel, This Human Season. From her scrupulously fashioned prose emerges a sprawling saga, structured in alternating chapters, of two Belfast families—the Catholic Morans and the Protestant Dunns—torn from without by their warring loyalties and from within by their own demons during the two months leading up to Christmas 1979.

Roberto Bolaño died (of liver failure) in 2003 at the age of fifty; he died in Spain, exiled from his birthplace, Chile. Much remains mysterious about his life. He had bad teeth. As a child he was diagnosed with dyslexia. He was arrested by Pinochet’s police. He wrote two impossibly long novels—his last, called 2666, is over one thousand pages long—and many poems; neither of the novels, and none of the poems, as far as I know, has yet appeared in English translation. He remains, for readers marooned in English, an unfolding discovery: New Directions, our savior, has published his

Creation myths fascinate us because they point to the time when things began to become as they are, and so suggest that we might go back and choose a different, better path. “The universe comes to be at the moment when God wills it to be,” John Crowley writes in Endless Things, the concluding volume of his four-part series, Ægypt. “It never existed before that moment, and after that moment it always did.” Now that the series is finally complete, this is rather how Ægypt—twenty years in the making—itself feels: as if it had been there all along, and Crowley

Forget Internet dating: Any city dweller who’s spent an afternoon walking a cute pup down the street will tell you that owning a dog is the surest way to make and sustain a connection. In Cathleen Schine’s meringue-light new novel The New Yorkers, canines of all shapes, sizes, and degrees of lovability unite a disparate collection of Manhattanites living on the same charming, rent-controlled street, an easy dog walk from Central Park. It’s an ordinary Upper West Side street that escaped gentrification, a street where people moved after graduating college and never left.”There are no mansions there, no narrow houses

Jim Crace opens his ninth novel, The Pesthouse, in a place not unlike what Greil Marcus once called “the old, weird America,” a nation of folk traditions and superstitions, of bindle stiffs and highwaymen. This is the land of Boxcar Bertha, the country Mark Twain captured in the river odyssey of Huck and Jim. It’s a mythic territory, dark and apocalyptic, one that seems forever lost to us beneath the slick culture we now occupy. For Crace, however, the old, weird America is not just where we’ve been but where we’re going. It’s our history and our destiny all in