Date: 2006 Author: Alexander Masters Unique, yes. Inspiring? It depends. Masters allows Stuart, his tragicomic homeless antihero, acres of crawlspace:…

Date: 1985 (2006) Author: Ryszard Kapuscinski, translated from the Polish by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand This is not…

Date: 1984 (1998) Author: Marguerite Duras, translated from the French by Barbara Bray Duras’ erotic prose poem set in postwar…

Date: 2006 Author: Richard Ford Ford’s third Frank Bascombe book (“The Sportswriter,” “Independence Day”) is a superior examination of middle…

Date: 2004 Author: Rattawut Lapcharoensap Rattawut Lapcharoensap is a natural. The eight short stories in this dazzling debut collection benefit…

Date: 2008 Author: Kevin Brockmeier What are Brockmeier’s fables about? Some examples. A young woman on a nondescript island is…

Date: 2004 Author: Shannon Burke Burke has a knack for urban purgatory. As in the more accomplished “Black Flies” (2008),…

Date: 2008 Author: Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews Among the shortest entries in this vicious compendium…

Date: 2008 Author: Paul Auster Auster’s best parables fuse sleight-of-hand stories with a Chinese box approach to plot. This oily…

Date: 2004 Author: Bob Dylan Sliced, diced or dissected to suit the gossipy cravings of rock mavens and learned critics,…

Date: 1985 Author: Julio Cortázar, translated by Paul Blackburn This elegant collection comes in two parts. The first is an…

Date: 2001 Author: Shirley Hazzard Hazzard’s chiseled portrait of novelist Graham Greene’s Capri years (he visited his Anacapri villa, Il Rosaio,…