Bookworm

Voice Over: A Nomadic Conversation with Mahmoud Darwish (Archipelago); Intimate Stranger (Archipelago); Notes from the Middle World (Haymarket Books) As a writer, South African-born Breyten Breytenbach is an activist. As an activist he functions as something like a conscience. As a participant in the global response to apartheid, he was imprisoned for seven years, and his writing comes from the anguished nightmares of his imprisonment. His is the art of passionate dissent; his prose and poetry are in service of a more "human" human race.

All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost (Norton) This short novel emerged virtually whole — unique in the writing life of its author, Lan Samantha Chang. Perhaps this is because the book is about the writing life...

Take One Candle Light a Room (Pantheon) The complexities of race and community are at the center of Susan Straight's lively discussion about family, memory, migration and history...

My Hollywood (Knopf) Mona Simpson's new novel corkscrews its way into the heart of a Santa Monica marriage, a marriage in which child raising duties are agreed to be divided fifty-fifty between husband and wife. Instead, they are divided fifty-fifty between wife and nanny...

Bitter in the Mouth (Random House) Monique Truong is an intransigent—she will not settle for anyone's desire to interpret or in any way falsity the world she knows. This time Vietnamese-born Truong sets to revealing the lies implicit in the question, "What is it like to grow up Asian in America?"

Tom McCarthy's C (Knopf) is one of those post-modern novels designed to drill a hole in your head and help you inventory the contents of your mind...

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Pantheon) Charles Yu's sweeter-spirited vision of how vintage science fiction can be used to imagine our world. Caught in a computer game, the hero seeks to escape his chronic melancholy. It just so happens that our hero's name is the same as the author's...

The Four Fingers of Death (Little, Brown) Rick Moody creates a sleazoid end-of-the-world saga, basing his story on a cheapo so-bad-it's-good sci-fi classic...

What Is Left the Daughter (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Howard Norman's Wyatt Hillyer has good reason to be blocked: His parents committed suicide within an hour of one another; his love has been unrequited; he assisted in an unpremeditated hate crime...

Super Sad True Love Story (Random House) Can Lenny and Eunice find love in a futuristic America in which computer screens instantly and constantly reveal economic status and sexual "hotness" quotients?