In his new novel Lionel Asbo Martin Amis returns to London’s mean streets, where a petty criminal, Lionel Pepperdine (renamed Asbo in honor of the UK’s notorious Anti-Social Behavior Order), wins a £140 million on the lottery. Lionel is a great comic-villain in the tradition of London Fields’ Keith Talent and The Information’s Steve “Scozzy” Cousins. Skyrocketed into society’s highest socio-economic echelons, Lionel struggles to reconcile front-page stardom with his modest, inner-city roots (he is from a fictional part of London where everything hates everything else: “the caff hates the van! the bike hates the shop! the pub hates

Heidi Julavits In The Vanishers, Heidi Julavits uses the framework of a paranormal mystery novel to examine the psychological intersections between illness, grief and the unbridgeable distances between mothers and daughters. Her protagonist, Julia Severn, is a gifted young psychic studying at the Institute of Integrated Parapsychology under the tutelage of her mentor, and soon to be adversary, Madame Ackermann. When Severn comes down with a mysterious and debilitating illness, later discovered to be the result of a psychic attack, she is forced to leave the Institute. Soon thereafter, she is swept up in an astral detective saga, chosen

Donald Antrim is the author of three novels and a memoir, The Afterlife. Recently, Picardor started reprinting the novels with new introductions by Antrim admirers Jonathan Franzen (who calls The Hundred Brothers “possibly the strangest novel ever published by an American) and George Saunders (who introduces The Verificationist, about a man who has an out-of-body experience while meeting with fellow psychoanalysts in a pancake house). In June, Antrim’s Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World will be reissued with an introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides. There’s an unmistakable difference between the three novels and Antrim’s more recent short fiction in

What most people know about Haiti can be reduced to two statements: Haiti is the world’s first independent black nation—the country declared its independence from France on January 1, 1804—and Haiti is presently the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Unfortunately, the country’s political victories are often overshadowed by media images of malnourished children and bedraggled homes. In his most recent book, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, historian and Duke University professor Laurent Dubois considers this lapse in historical memory.

The first thing that catches your eye about the London-based White Review’s third issue is the color gradient on the cover, which shades from a mesmerizing forest green to light burnt orange. After this, it’s what’s inside: The magazine features an impressive variety of work—from poetry and fiction translated from Japanese, Spanish, and Yiddish to reports on the extinction of whales in the Antarctic and stories of Perec and the Situationists in Belleville. In addition to producing a quarterly print publication, the White Review publishes monthly online issues and programs events in London and elsewhere. In honor of the

David Graeber David Graeber is an anthropologist, anarchist, the author of Debt: the First 5,000 Years, a professor at Goldsmith’s, University of London, and one of the organizers of Occupy Wall Street, which is the subject of his forthcoming book. Bookforum spoke with the writer in Los Angeles about the future of anthropology, ecstatic moments in activism, and the problem of political imagination. Bookforum: You’re an anthropologist who has written a book that combines history, economics, and philosophy. What drew you to anthropology as a discipline? David Graeber: I got involved in anthropology largely because I like to think

A couple of weeks ago I spoke with Geoff Dyer on the phone about—well, what, exactly? The idea was to discuss his new book, Zona, but we ended up drifting over so many other topics that I never even bothered to ask him why he wanted to write about Tarkovsky’s The Stalker in the first place. Before the actual interview began we chatted about his review of Richard Bradford’s Martin Amis: the Biography, and by the end he was giving me advice about which David Markson book I should read first. Our interview, in other words, assumed the shape