Date: 2007 Author: Dinaw Menestu What a mournful, fatalistic and spellbindingly hopeful first novel. Narrator Sepha Stephanos, son of upscale…

Date: 2005 Author: August Kleinzhaler San Francisco poet and sometime social critic Kleinzhaler revels in the role of roguish, hard-drinking…

Date: 2000 Author: Mohsin Hamid Stoned on heroin in his smelly Lahore apartment, Daru treats moths like badminton birds, swatting…

Date: 2009 (1990) Author: César Aira Here is the story: Chilean night watchman Raúl Viñas, his wife Elisa and their…

Date: 2004 (1972) Author: Roger Angell Angell makes the sports passion of the common man literate. “The Summer Game” is…

Date: 2008 Author: David Maraniss Maraniss is an accomplished storyteller with luminous work to his credit, but much of this…

Date: 2009 Author: Joe Torre and Tome Verducci American sports books are peculiar in the way they stake out a…

Date: 2009 (1992) Author: Denis Johnson There’s that Polish neighborhood, “They have that fruit with the light on it, they…

Date: 2008 Author: Amélie Nothomb, translated from the French by Alison Anderson Nothomb is a neurotic charmer too self-centered to…

Date: 2007 Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald This young man Fitzgerald writes promising sentences. He gives melody to disaffection and amorality.…

Date: 1983 (2006) Author: Ryszard Kapuscinski, translated by William Brand Here is what we learn about Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selasie…

Date: 2008 Author: Michel Faber Faber’s latest U.S. book tour must have riled him. His oddball parable profanes Amazon, Dan…