The first novel that Hilary Mantel wrote was about the French Revolution. It did not start out as a novel, exactly, nor did she start out as a novelist. It was 1975, and she was twenty-three, living in Manchester and selling dresses in a department store. She had realized that she didn’t have the money to finish her legal training, and, after a year working in a geriatric hospital, that she didn’t want to be a social worker. She was bored with selling dresses; she had started taking books about the French Revolution out of the library, one after another. Then she began taking notes. After she

To those who met them in Japanese-occupied Manchukuo in 1935, the Swiss businessman Charles Emile Martin and his American partner, Cy Oggins, must have seemed an enigmatic pair. Oggins was a distinguished-looking man with craggy features, well-made suits, and a penchant for silver-topped walking sticks. He seemed to know a great deal about Oriental antiquities, and sometimes described himself as an art dealer. Martin was more discreet, preferring plain neckties and gabardine overcoats, though his wife Elsa was fond of elegant handbags and furs. Both men were polyglots, with a wide if vague

In a lecture given at New York University’s Deutsches Haus on the 28th of October last year, some months before the publication of a very fat new book named Less Than Nothing, philosopher Slavoj Zizek interrupted one of his characteristic digressions to make an aside that was particularly revealing. He said of G. W. F. Hegel, “Sometimes he is very evil.” And then—involuntarily beaming—“I love him.”

It was a startling statement, even for those hardened to Zizek’s fondness for vivid obscenities and scatological humor. Hegel, the last philosopher who appeared to know everything—the inventor of

Even in a culture that frequently dwells on acts of navel-gazing and fictional worlds with multiple levels of reality, Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas stands out. Where other novelists stumble around their intricate plots and too-clever sleights of hand, Vila-Matas approaches his eccentrically structured novels with nimbleness and sharp irony. Bartleby & Co., his first novel to be translated into English, takes the form of a series of footnotes to a book never written, drafted by a failed writer who follows Melville’s Bartleby in preferring not to. Never Any End to Paris, which made

Charles Baudelaire’s portrait of fictional poet Samuel Cramer in the 1847 novella Fanfarlo—a brief send-up of the artistic personality in the mid-nineteenth century—remains forcefully apropos: “He is at once a great lazybones, pitifully ambitious, and famous for unhappiness.” Fanfarlo satirizes Parisian bohemia with a light touch, far from the gothic grotesqueries and threatening chiaroscuro of Les Fleurs du Mal or the dark ironies of Le Spleen de Paris. Edward K. Kaplan’s brisk new translation of this early work nicely captures the book’s humor—airy but not without a certain reserved malice.