Date: 2009 (1993) Author: Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews While Bolaño’s Babylon-sized novels (“The Savage Detectives,”…

Date: 2009 Author: Paul Auster Auster’s pretentious “Invisible” is aroused from square one. Coital escapades are par for the course,…

Date: 1998 Author: Magnus Mills If ever a contemporary novelist got to the Tao of wry, it’s Mills in this…

Date: 2009 Author: Philip Roth Roth’s latest ode to male twilight works quite well until it plunges into sex. After…

Date: 1982 Author: Paul Hoffmann Over the years, foreign correspondent Hoffmann wrote a number of meticulously bittersweet accounts of life…

Date: 1991 Author: Fleur Jaeggy, translated from the Italian by Tim Parks Medieval physicians bled patients to expunge damning spirits.…

Date: 2009 Author: J.M. Coetzee Coetzee’s previous novel, “Diary of Bad Year,” a corrosively fine book about a gruff and…

Date: 1997 Author: Paul Hoffmann Congenial is an appropriate word to describe Paul Hoffmann’s gracious if occasionally melancholy account of…

Date: 2009 Author: Chuck Palahnuik Subversive as ever, Palahniuk may have written the first great 21st century high school spoof.…

Date: 2009 Author: Denis Johnson You’ve got to love a potboiler with Camels, Camaros, and black and blue Caddies; with…

Date: 2009 Author: Mario Bellatín, translated from the Spanish by Kurt Hollander The narrator of Bellatín’s slight but insidious parable…

Date: 2003 Author: Nicole Krauss June 1957, an atomic test in Nevada (“comic book doomsday”); May 2000, a man, thirty-something…