For Marilynne Robinson, crafting a novel is a way to consider both the work of divinity and that of human obligation. The word craft has for her its Old English meaning—strength—and is intended to be not merely painstaking but expressive of understanding. The odd beauty attained by Home, its method of fitting together with her Pulitzer Prize–winning previous novel, Gilead (2004), the moral discoveries that her characters seem almost to demand of themselves—these are in fact also matters of craft and can be studied in the lathing of the novel’s planks, the jointures of its corners.

The Russian-literature allusions in Victor Pelevin’s novel begin right at the beginning. Not with the Lolita epigraph at the head of chapter 1—though that is anything but timid—but in the preceding “Commentary by Experts.” Here is the kind of textual apparatus that Nabokov so enjoyed, in which the voice of authority comically enhances the simulated nonfictional status of the text. And it’s not only Nabokov who classes up the joint in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, the tenth offering from Pelevin, himself Russian (and still only in his mid-forties). The author parcels out a dense array of references to

How boring does your hometown have to be for Siberia to tickle wanderlust? The narrator of To Siberia, a melancholy novel by Per Petterson, is an interesting test case. Growing up in a Danish village in the ’30s, she and her brother retreat from their grandfather’s drunken binges and their father’s palpable aura of failure into atlases and histories, where they see nothing but escape hatches. Jesper, the unnamed narrator’s daring older brother, dreams of Morocco. His sister, however, sets her sights on Siberia: “I wanted open skies . . . where it was easy to breathe and easy to

On April 26, 1998, Monseñor Juan José Gerardi Conedera was beaten to death in his garage with a chunk of concrete, a few days after he announced the publication of a fourteen-hundred-page, four-volume report on the atrocities committed by the military during Guatemala’s endless civil war. The report detailed in painfully unambiguous terms the torture, rape, and genocide perpetrated against Guatemala’s indigenous Mayans, thought by the military to be sheltering guerilla warriors.

One could thumbnail The Pisstown Chaos, David Ohle’s third novel in thirty-odd years, as a dark-comic fantasia, and the author himself as a long-term toiler in the fields of postwar American experimentalism. And yet he remains elusive, far more obscure than he deserves to be, and the book, like the rest of Ohle’s small oeuvre, is a bit hard to account for. His first book, Motorman, from 1972, could be situated within the vein of Barthelme et al.; but what came after—well, what came after was silence. Decades passed, the debut accruing cult status all the while, until the appearance

“Thank you for asking me to submit to your magazine, / Dead Fluffy Coyote, / but I haven’t been writing much poetry lately. / I’ve been rockin’. / Or, I should say, rockin’ again.” In the swaggering opening lines of The Virgin Formica, Sharon Mesmer lays out its central conceit: that poetry is the least of her concerns––she’s been livin’ and will continue to do so, regardless of what the academic peanut gallery has to say about it. Often flowing down the page in lanky, listlike columns, her profane and funny poems venerate the vernacular and the blue-collar through rhapsodizing

Each of Stacey D’Erasmo’s three psychologically intricate novels begins with a crisis. In Tea, her 2000 debut, an eight-year-old girl is asked to bring a cup of tea to her mother, who is taking a bath; when the next section opens, we come to understand that the woman has since committed suicide. In A Seahorse Year (2004), a San Francisco couple cope with the disappearance of their teenage son, who has ominously left a knife stuck into the floorboards of his room; they soon learn that he is schizophrenic. Now, in The Sky Below, D’Erasmo starts with a trauma that

Ever since Wordsworth wrote “The Idiot Boy,” a long poem about Betty Foy and her mentally handicapped son, the developmentally disabled have played the part of romantic hero in literature—most powerfully Faulkner’s Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury.