For all that Orhan Pamuk the citizen has been embroiled in legal struggles with the Turkish state, he strikes me in one sense as an elemental patriot. To chronicle something obsessively is a form of love, and Pamuk documents the details of his Istanbul obsessively.

Morley Callaghan's That Summer In Paris, written in 1962, reveals Hemingway's and Fitzgerald's true nature, and offers an insider's view of the events in Paris, in the summer of 1929.

I am not so certain I read hope in these pages but there is redemption within them, something that keeps the fantastical and mystical events that do not often end happily from seeming ripe with despair.

From Poe to Kafka, from Melville to W. G. Sebald, alienation and the uncanny have usually come to us with a chill, a coldness that questions not only the nature of human relationships but even the possibility of them.

If Axler sounds like a Bernhard character here, expatiating feverishly on the nature of suicide, it’s because The Humbling is, at bottom, a madman novel.

The Berlin Stories is two short novels, published separately in the 1930s. It was an inspired pairing. Together they flesh out the world Isherwood describes: Berlin of the very early 1930s, imperfect in the extreme, but a paradise for Isherwood's hitherto uneven talent.

The Supreme Dicks seem to oppose more or less everything and everyone else. And therein lies the greatness of this book.

Too many comics coast on manufactured nihilism, but Amy and Jordan feels like an act of exorcism, transmuting real anguish into entertainment. It is a testament to the the survival instinct.

Laura van den Berg’s debut collection manages to establish an equilibrium between concept and poignancy.

Eating Animals is a sensitive and brave book and as such will always be met by certain criticisms reserved for things which are sensitive and brave.

Jonke is adept at blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. And he ably navigates metafictional and musical composition elements with comedic and fabulist registers while also experimenting with language on the page.

Vincent’s mental illness and Goliath’s gigantism are central to these stories but also incidental; the disabilities sit in the stories as elements that render and support each fiction’s emotional truth.

The New Yorker published nine of Dovlatov's stories between 1981 and 1989. Why is he so little known or read in the West today?

A fan will welcome this glimpse into the mind of the young Vonnegut.

Any detail one might seek – a name, a face, a room, a shadow, an era, a feeling or the mere hint of one – exists in paint and it’s all available, for pleasure and plunder.

The Death of a President, unsurprisingly, is pure hagiography, but that's actually the large part of its charm.