The fictional universe of Zakes Mda is no place for the cold rationalist. In six novels, the fifty-eight-yearold writer whom the New York Times recently hailed as “one of the most prominent black novelists in South African history” has demonstrated an abiding attachment to the seemingly ludicrous. In fact, his love of the improbable is so pervasive that some readers have mistaken it for an embrace of superstition. Novelist Norman Rush, perhaps his fiercest critic, castigated him in the New York Review of Books for leaving such realities as AIDS unaddressed, saying that The Heart of Redness (2002) is an

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

That a chemist figures prominently in Andrea Barrett’s new novel, The Air We Breathe, will come as no surprise to those familiar with her fiction. Over the past decade, Barrett has produced a novel and two story collections that dramatize an abiding fascination with scientists in late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury milieus. Her characters, both historical and imaginary, have included botanists, geneticists, zoologists, biologists, and ornithologists. A genealogical chart is appended to Barrett’s latest offering, illustrating the latticework of relationships that unites major and peripheral characters in all four books. In this way, The Air We Breathe completes the author’s ingenious tetralogy.

The Life Room, Jill Bialosky’s second novel, reimagines Tolstoy’s societydriven epic, Anna Karenina, as a bildungsroman. Though the plot parallels the sordid events surrounding the affair between the troubled Anna and the dashing Count Vronsky, the best moments in Bialosky’s book concern the interior life of Eleanor Cahn, a literature professor, wife, and mother in her late thirties who has yet to grow up. Her existence may seem like a privileged mix of office hours, dinner parties, and Central Park playdates, but “her true desires,” Bialosky writes, have remained “locked up in a suitcase.” After the fateful appearance of her

“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

Perhaps the title of Jason Brown’s second story collection, Why the Devil Chose New England For His Work, begins with an interrogative because this is a book that believes in right and wrong answers. Most of the eleven tales describe exceptional instances in the lives of the residents of Vaughn, a fictional Maine town. It might be more accurate, however, to say that the town does the telling. Right-minded, rigid, yet deeply conflicted, Vaughn’s inhabitants collectively struggle to repress their less virtuous instincts. It’s no wonder that the devil chose this semimythical rural New England burg: No place could more

In Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s stories, the subjectivity of perception is often dramatized. His principal subjects—the gap between society and self; the conflict between tradition and modernity, religion and enlightenment—are transformed via various renderings. Mandarins, his latest collection, features fifteen tales, including three new English translations. In the title story, a man’s spell of apathy and ennui is momentarily broken when he witnesses the young peasant woman he’s been observing on a train throwing mandarins, “the color of the warm sun” and a symbol of Japanese daily life and hope, out the window to her brothers as they bid her permanent farewell.