When I recently tried to describe Jenny Offill’s novel Dept. of Speculation to one of my closest friends, I told her it was the kind of book that should be boring but isn’t. What I meant is that it’s about parenting and adultery and a marriage between sensible-enough middle-class Americans, and that plot-wise nothing shocking or even particularly weird happens, but that reading it kept me up into the night, and at six in the morning, closing its covers, I felt invigorated instead of sleep-deprived. Faced with the task of explaining the book, though—of trying to describe the short

Eula Biss opens her new book, On Immunity: An Inoculation, with a description of a video her husband recorded the day before she gave birth to their son. In the video, she observes, her face looked free of fear. Twenty-four hours later, after a difficult labor and a blood transfusion, this was no longer true. Suddenly she feared many things: lead paint in the walls, toxic plastics in the crib mattress, carcinogenic minerals in the water. It was 2009, the H1N1 vaccination campaign was soon to launch, and a post-recession wariness tinged the air—“not a good season for trust,”

J.D. Salinger spent nearly the last sixty years of his life as a recluse, attempting to outrun the fame brought by his celebrated first novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951). In Thomas Beller’s new biography, J.D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, Salinger’s life appears as a triptych, in which the entire last half of Salinger’s life—but only one story, “Hapworth 16, 1924”—is relegated to the final panel. The first panel includes Salinger’s early stories (1940-1948), and “Slight Rebellion off Madison,” which later formed the basis for Catcher. The second panel describes the height of Salinger’s fame and concludes in 1963,

In 1999, Richard A. Clarke, the US Counterterrorism Czar for Clinton and Bush, wanted to attach Hellfire missiles to unarmed Predator drones so that he could kill Osama bin Laden. In the months before September 11, Predators set their cameras upon the al Qaeda leader several times, but Tomahawk cruise missiles—then the only option for unmanned strikes—took hours to reach Afghanistan from the launch submarines off the coast of Pakistan. After the attacks, lethal drones were an easy sell. Thirteen years and four-hundred covert drone strikes later, Clarke has written a thriller about the program for which he admits

Stacey D’Erasmo Brian Eno famously said that everyone who bought the first Velvet Underground album when it came out ended up starting a band. Someday soon, something similar could be said of Stacey D’Erasmo’s music-drenched road novel Wonderland. It’s truly an inspiring work—a master class in structure and character—and it makes you want to be a rocker and a writer. The story follows a former rock star, Anna Brundage, as she attempts a risky comeback and tours across Europe with her new band. I recently spoke with D’Erasmo about artistic ambition, the phenomenon of “dating your own characters,” and

In 2005, seasoned Special Forces machine gunner Caleb Daniels lost eight members of his unit in a Chinook helicopter crash in Afghanistan. As Jennifer Percy describes in her recent book, Demon Camp, Caleb was haunted afterward by images of friends’ charred bodies. When he left Afghanistan, something he called The Black Thing followed him home. Caleb struggled to adjust to civilian life, certain The Black Thing was trying to kill him. Then he met a minister, who persuaded him the apparition was a Destroyer Demon, just one in a pantheon of demons and angels fighting a war between good and

Capitalism: A Ghost Story (Haymarket), Arundhati Roy’s latest book, describes in impassioned detail the consequences of India’s economic and political choices over the past few decades, from which a few Indians have benefited and many, many more suffered. In late March, Roy read from the work to a sold-out hall at the New School. Afterward, she spoke to Siddhartha Deb about India’s wealth divide, the expectations of the country’s “brash new middle class,” the impending elections, and the Naxalite protests in the forest. Roy became famous for her much-admired 1997 novel, The God of Small Things. The nonfiction that she

Yan Lianke Yan Lianke occupies a contradictory place in the landscape of contemporary Chinese literature: He is one of the country’s foremost novelists—winner of both the Lu Xun and Lao She prizes—but four of his books have been banned and can only be read in foreign editions. Once a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army (where he had a job writing propaganda), he lost his commission in 2004 after the publication of the Chinese edition of Lenin’s Kisses and was, for a period, barred from leaving the country. But the political winds have shifted yet again, and he now

Hilton Als It’s been 15 years since the publication of Hilton Als’s previous essay collection, The Women. Now, in the florid White Girls, the New Yorker writer expounds on topics as varied as Truman Capote, Louise Brooks, Gone With the Wind, and Eminem. Effortlessly controversial, Als manages to add new layers to familiar subjects (the “n-word,” Richard Pryor, Flannery O’Connor) and fearlessly challenges conventions of race, culture, and sexuality. Bookforum recently called the author to ask him about White Girls. BOOKFORUM: You call a lot of people “white girls” in your new book, including Louise Brooks and Flannery O’Connor,

When I meet with John Freeman to discuss his new book, How to Read a Novelist, he is in the middle of moving. The wood-planked floors groan under the weight of books, thousands of them stowed in boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling. He offers coffee—the coffee maker isn’t packed yet—and I see at once that he’s the sort of bibliophile whose immersion in the world of fictional people hasn’t hampered his ability to communicate with real, breathing ones. The coffee is good and strong; I haven’t had a cup in almost two years, an experiment in caffeine deprivation that