Culo. Coño. Puta. Mariconcito. Coje that fea y metéselo! The number of obscenities that appear within the first twenty-five pages of Junot Díaz’s second book, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, makes it abundantly clear that he’s not writing for Oprah’s Book Club. At the very least, Winfrey would have to bone up on her four-letter Spanish before she could rubberstamp this book, because more than any other author writing today, Díaz sings straight to the heart of urban Spanglish, and he’s not waiting for outsiders to catch up. His Spanish is untranslated, as is his freestyle hip-hop slang.

In the well-off northeastern suburb of Stonewood Heights, Ruth Ramsey is the high school Health & Family Life—that is, sex-ed—teacher. Her job is to shepherd the enclave’s adolescents on their glide path from affluent school to prestigious college free of pregnancy and STDs, by educating them in the ways of safe sex. Or at least it was, until members of a new fundamentalist church, the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth, accuse her of advocating oral sex after she remarks in class that “some people enjoy it.” Embarrassed in the media and threatened with a lawsuit, the school district announces that

When nineteen-year-old Ukrainian schoolgirl Irina Blazhko arrives in the English countryside to begin life as a farmworker in Marina Lewycka’s new novel, Strawberry Fields, she first notices “the dazzling salty light dancing on the sunny field, the ripening strawberries, the little rounded trailer perched up on the hill and the oblong boxy trailer down in the corner of the field, the woods beyond, and the long, curving horizon” and dreamily thinks to herself, “So this is England.” Never mind that she has traveled by bus from “Kiev to Kent in fortytwo hours” and was met off the ferry in Dover

“Many people answer with ‘Yes, but . . .’” wrote Marcel Duchamp in 1954, in a tribute to his great friend Picabia, who had died the year before. “With Francis it was always: ‘No, because . . .’” Inventor of the “machinist painting” and carrier of the Dada virus to New York and Paris, Picabia was editor of the journal 391 and author of numerous books of poetry and prose, along with manifestos, aphorisms, and scenarios for ballets and films. He impressed everyone who met him with a cocksure nihilism. “Anybody called Francis is elegant, unbalanced, and intelligent,” Gertrude Stein

Percival Everett—author, academic, fly fisherman, woodworker, painter, and mule trainer—has a talent for militant irony that feeds on variety and extremes. Refreshingly profane, his novels have nimbly led such sacred cows as African-American studies and Native American reparations to the abattoir. In Erasure (2001), he gave us the down-and-out novelist Thelonius Ellison, who, fed up with being told his fiction isn’t “black enough,” writes a book called My Pafology—and promptly garners Oprah-sanctioned fame. Everett’s new book takes on another worthy if easier target— George W. Bush’s America—but this time he engages in stylistic overkill and undermines the novel’s few salient