Atonement is a gut-punch of a book that toys with the idea of the reliable narrator and gets one thinking about the ethics of story-telling and the power that a writer has to bend history to his will.

In Lydia Davis' hands, things are both exactly what they are and not quite what they seem, and after an hour or so, Varieties of Disturbance starts to look less like a collection of experimental fiction and more like an adventure story.

At the center of this story, which, like many family histories, is at once tremendously unlikely and perfectly plausible, Jeffrey Eugenides has placed the two great standards of the human race: a pair of genitals, and a heart.

I think of Jonathan Lethem as the poet laureate of gentrification.

I admire imagination and craft, in equal measure. Kelly Link is one of the very few who have both in seemingly limitless quantity.

In American Genius, a Comedy, Tillman becomes, in effect, a dozen Ellingtons conducting a monumental symphony played by an orchestra consisting of a single multifarious instrument.

The book’s modest, carefully planed language and its concern with primary human needs make it timeless.