Even then, it was obvious she was a genius,” said Miss Katherine Scott, Flannery O’Connor’s freshman-composition teacher, speaking to a reporter many years later about her most famous student—“warped, but a genius all the same.” The teacher no doubt focused on the warped part when the seventeen-year-old Catholic girl with the spectacles and the searing wit took her writing class at Milledgeville’s Georgia State College for Women in the summer of 1942; and it was the warped part she noticed some ten years later, when she read O’Connor’s first book, Wise Blood, and flung it across the room. “I thought

In the title story of Antonya Nelson’s latest collection, Nothing Right, a divorced mother asks her teenage son—who’d once loved to be read to and now balks at writing a paper on Macbeth—why he dislikes literature. “It’s not real,” he says. “Just a bunch of imaginary crap.” Sure, you could give the kid an argument about Shakespeare, and so could the mother if she, like a lot of Nelson’s characters, weren’t worn down by parenthood. She recognizes, as he does not, that something like the story of “a weak king and his bitchy wife” has recently played out “in his

Posthumous literary reputations are tricky affairs, as is the appellation “a writer’s writer.” It might be said that both serve a compensatory function, making up for a less than obliging reality by suggesting an artistic worthiness that doesn’t translate into popular appeal. Such is the case of Richard Yates, once neglected and now celebrated, who died from emphysema at the age of sixty-six on November 7, 1992, after years of smoking four packs a day, alcoholism, and general bipolar calamitousness (including one early suicide attempt and intermittent breakdowns).

This war will go on for a long time,” Ismail Kadare writes near the end of The Siege. “This is only the beginning.” It’s no accident, though, that even a careful reader may not know exactly which war he’s talking about. On the surface, the conflict in question is a fifteenth-century Ottoman siege of an unnamed Albanian castle or, seen more broadly, Balkan resistance to Turkish rule. But in Kadare’s work, the surface doesn’t count for much. Like his other novels set deep in the Albanian past—Elegy for Kosovo (1998) and The Three-Arched Bridge (1978) among them—The Siege is not,

Book of Clouds arrives coated in the sort of effusive blurbs conspicuous only when absent from a first novel’s jacket these days. It takes place in twenty-first-century Berlin, a city many have tried to capture with words, brushstrokes, and various shutter speeds, but one ignored by many of its residents in favor of their own misguided hopes and dreams. There the book follows Tatiana, the alter ego of the author, Chloe Aridjis, as she floats through life aimlessly, with a taste for ennui and slipshod metaphor. Very little happens to Tatiana/Chloe, whose defining characteristics are that she is Mexican (the

Zoë Heller is a witty, observant portraitist of misanthropes. She takes a bit of a risk with her brisk, showily unsentimental protagonists whose surface confidence hides layers of rage. Rage can be gripping and funny. But overconfidence in one’s harsh judgment of others and blindness to one’s own pursuit of vast, subterranean emotional needs are qualities tougher to reform and harder to warm up to, than, say, the emotional haplessness mined by Nick Hornby.

In 1928, dime novelist William Wallace Cook published Plotto, a practical guide to narrative construction. In it, he sets out a general schematic that his readers, or “plottoists,” would do well to keep in mind: An individual with certain attributes encounters some difficulty or complication, which is then addressed and/or resolved. Cook goes on to elaborate hundreds of possible complications, while cross-referencing individuals with certain attributes who might have encountered them and detailing ways the situation could turn out. Whether or not Jesse Ball is familiar with Cook’s endlessly permutable plot boiler, something of its spirit animates his second novel,

Will Heller is a sixteen-year-old paranoid schizophrenic experiencing a mental break. During the course of a day, Will, nicknamed Lowboy, moves through the underground sprawl of Manhattan’s subways, occasionally surfacing. As he likewise dips into and out of psychosis, he reasons, through the screaming overload of his thoughts, that losing his virginity will “cool the world,” saving it from the destruction of climate change, for “the world’s inside of me . . . just like I am inside the world.” Through the logic of his crushing illness, Will is trying to save himself.

The final scene in The Grapes of Wrath is unforgettable: Rose of Sharon nursing a starving old man after the birth of her stillborn baby. And in the face of headlines daily declaring the worst economic collapse since the Depression, Steinbeck is worth remembering. It’s unexpected, though, to encounter echoes of his work in tales set as far from California as rural Pakistan. But Daniyal Mueenuddin, a half-American, half-Pakistani writer, has crafted a chronicle of poverty as detailed and revealing as any by Steinbeck, with the same drive to humanize his subjects. Mueenuddin’s collection of linked stories does for the

The Wilderness is Samantha Harvey’s first novel, but it feels like a mature work, as well crafted and as cryptic—“familiar and strange in one breath”—as an ancient boat found preserved in the peat of the northern-England moors where the book is mostly set. The boat, like many other objects in this elaborately allusive text, is a metaphor for the problems of memory that dog the main character, Jake, an architect and the grandson of Holocaust victims, throughout his life.

Described on the back cover as a “stand-alone novel,” Tom LeClair’s Passing Through completes a trilogy begun with Passing Off (1996) and Passing On (2004). It will doubtless appeal most to readers who come to it with a fondness for the protagonist, the author and sometime hero Michael Keever. They will recall Keever as a former point guard in the Greek Basketball Association and the spoiler of an eco-terrorist plot—a plot Passing On revealed to be a fabrication ghostwritten by Keever’s increasingly disgruntled wife.