Jean Rhys lived a hard-luck life and wrote, almost exclusively, about hard-luck women. Her pellucid writing, in which shards of pained observation cut a jagged edge in an otherwise fluid style, is so accessible that it is easy to overlook the art—the tight control—behind the seeming artlessness. Like those of Marguerite Duras and Katherine Mansfield, Rhys’s natural psychological habitat was despondency of a particularly female kind—what Mansfield in her notebooks describes as “an air of steady desperation,” hinging on desiring and desirability. With the exception of Rhys’s last novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, which reimagines Jane Eyre’s Mrs. Rochester, her characters

If artists can be divvied up into prodigies and late bloomers, the British writer Francis Wyndham has been both. His melancholy publishing history suggests this split career has been more a curse than a blessing. He composed his first stories between the ages of seventeen and twenty, during World War II, “while I was hanging about waiting to be called up and while I was convalescing after I had been invalided out of the army,” he once wrote. A collection was rejected by publishers—paper was in short supply, so it was difficult to get published, he told a recent interviewer.

There’s no making nice here, no way of easing into this writer’s sensibility. In The Girl with Brown Fur, Stacey Levine ignores lyricism as an evolutionary dead end. Life is fractious and dire, her prose style says; let fiction serve as razor and torch. It’s not that Levine isn’t funny or that she doesn’t forge phrases and sentences of throat-clutching beauty. It’s just that her effort to dissect humankind’s propensity for neuroses, fallacies, and other inanities requires measured drollery and surgical concision. And because her characters are pathologically ill at ease within their dysfunctional bodies and families, not to mention

It’s hard to know whether the yearning for transcendence is what keeps poets in business or whether it’s exactly the thing that makes their business so marginal to profane, multifarious contemporary life. Variations on the theme “Get over it” are ambient, like those messages encouraging folks to forget God and start enjoying themselves that a group called the British Humanist Association paid to have plastered on the sides of London buses last winter. Employing strikingly different means, a pair of books by two New York–based, very cosmopolitan poets demonstrates an unseemly interest in God. Robert Polito’s title, Hollywood & God,

Brian Evenson’s five short-fiction collections and four novels are wonderfully difficult to categorize. Recognizable as literary fiction, but with strong undertows of horror and mystery, his style is all the more intriguing for defying classification. The stories in Fugue State will not disappoint, for Evenson extends his obsession with the uncanny and the unhinged that has won him a small but loyal following.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf ponders Coleridge’s claim that a “great mind must be androgynous”: “He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.” The life and work of Clarice Lispector are marked by a yearning for such undividedness, a grasping after universals. “Facts and particulars annoy me,” she once remarked, and in the novel Água viva (1973), she wrote, “There is much I cannot tell you. I am not going to be autobiographical. I want to be ‘bio.’” As Benjamin

For most readers (perhaps users would be a better word) of Chronic City, there will come a moment when they’re forced to admit that what they have in their hands is a stoner book, with all that implies, good and bad. On the most basic level, the title gives it away. Lethem’s New York is a sick city, suffering from physical disintegration and advanced dope psychosis. Everything seems connected to everything else, each wacky allusion, each comically dense situation, weaving baroque tangles of interrelation, until reader, writer, and characters all realize they’re trapped in a forest of signs and will

Although science fiction is known as a “literature of ideas,” many recent novels in the genre have been stuck in a rut of fun but safe geek technophilia or retro “boy’s adventure” stories. In a way, then, Mark von Schlegell’s Mercury Station feels both fresh and dated, because it ignores most of the current scene. Instead, the novel harks back to the heyday of such New Wave giants as J. G. Ballard, as well as such glorious eccentrics as Ursula K. Le Guin, John Calvin Batchelor, and Philip K. Dick, while shooting off stylistic fireworks reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov.

“Mordancy: there was something that could not really be taught. But it could be borrowed. It could be rubbed up against. It could scrape you like bark.” The words belong to Tassie Keltjin, the narrator of Lorrie Moore’s third novel, A Gate at the Stairs, and in their incisiveness they maybe tell us a bit too much about both the character and her creator. Tassie is twenty, a student in the midwestern college town of “Troy”; Moore herself teaches at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. And mordancy is for Tassie the kind of grown-up sass she associates with a