William Nicholson

William Nicholson is a writer whose work I have greatly enjoyed: Shadowlands, especially, but also the play The Retreat From Moscow and his two novels. He has a new novel out in Britain, to be released in July in the States, and the trouble he had finding a publisher speaks loudly to the defects of contemporary literature. Several publishers balked at the book, The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life, because it did not present comfortable, middle-class characters as malformed objects of derision. Perversion and degradation in the suburbs? Fine. But enlightenment can only be accessed through 98-pound heroin addicts living in Zanzibar. Nicholson was actually told, "We can't publish a novel about a people who drive 4x4s." The book was "not quirky enough." For his part, Nicholson says that "in the little details of domestic life are offered intense forms of existence that aren't often presented in books." I am eager to read it.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

It should have been apparent from the dust jacket blurb announcing that the author of this story collection, Wells Tower, had been published in McSweeney's and the New Yorker (and that he "divides his time" between Chapel Hill and, of course, Brooklyn) that he would be a certain type of writer, I believe the term is hipster fraud, who would not be worth reading, but I once again made the mistake of wasting my time on a new author while shelves of old, proven great books looked on in silent mockery. Everything Tower writes is false. David Garnett's extraordinary tale of a woman turning into a fox is more believable than even the most mundane occurence in one of these stories. Tower piles on the he-man incidents -- hunting, car mechanics, carpentry -- in an attempt at Hemingway, I suppose, but the result is sad impotence. He is a despicable writer whose book I am tempted to burn rather than resell.

Blue Movie

Blue Movie, Terry Southern's 1970 novel about a director's effort to make an artistically valid stag film, is funny and sharp. Southern worked in the movie business, and as outrageous as some of the incidents in Blue Movie are, you get the idea that they aren't the half of it.

Lady Into Fox and A Man in the Zoo

David Garnett's story titles are accurate: In the first, a lady turns into a fox; in the second, a man is exhibited in a zoo. First published in 1922 and 1924, they are tall tales that, because of Garnett's skill, appear plausible and, ultimately, true. And they leave the reader understanding that human nature and animal nature intersect at more points than previously thought.

The Dwarf

Lagerkvist's dwarf is not human, or rather he is but does not see himself as such. He stands apart, serving at the court of an Italian prince, dispensing bilious, cynical commentary on war, human nature, and love. He says: "I have noticed that sometimes I frighten people; what they really fear is themselves. They think it is I who scare them, but it is the dwarf within them, the ape-faced manlike being who sticks up his head from the depths of their souls." An uncomfortable, piercing book.

The Holy Land

Par Lagerkvist's clean, unadorned style accommodates elaborate meanings in this fable on the trials of belief. Only 85 pages, it is stripped of all unnecessary words, giving a radiant effect.

Liquidation

A brief, head-in-the-clouds novel by Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz, Liquidation is tentative, overwrought, and ultimately unsatisfying. But there are moments of shining clarity, mostly in the meditations on the role of literature in life. "Man lives as a worm but writes as a god" comes to mind as one of the lines that repay the two or three hours spent with this book.

The Politician

Anyone who stands in front of thousands of people and pledges to go to Washington to "fight for the little guy" is the worst kind of fraud, yet Americans respond over and over to this Hitlerian pitch. John Edwards is a pathetic human being, as this book by his former aide shows, but he is hardly exceptional.

I'm Not Stiller

This Max Frisch novel of could be summed up in two sentences: "I'm not Stiller. Oh yes, you are." In between are 404 pages of tall tales and psychological drama. Frisch's spring of ideas is so deep that when the book ends, you are left thinking (and maybe wishing) that he could have gone on writing indefinitely.

The Borzoi 1920

This fifth anniversary collection is for book lovers, those who can admire not only the written word but the paper it is printed on, a book's binding, design, and feel. Alfred A. Knopf began his publishing house in 1915 as a mere 23-year-old and was responsible for bringing out editions of some of the most important foreign authors of the time -- Mann, Hamsun, Reymont, Undset, among others. With that accomplishment, he can be excused for predicting in this book's postcript the monumental importance of several forthcoming volumes that proved to be less than epoch-making.

Hunger

As Isaac Bashevis Singer points out in his introduction, Knut Hamsun's novel is startling in its originality and sincerity. Hamsun makes his character smarter than the reader, places him in intolerable poverty, and has him use his wits to finds means of escape, always temporary. The young man has no past, no family, and an uncertain future, but he is dignified and uncompromising. And he is a writer. Hamsun's descriptions of hunger and the lengths to which his hero goes to assuage it (chewing on wood chips or a bloody butcher's bone) are striking. I have read that the hero in all of Hamsun's best work is this same type, a young, iconoclastic, tormented, and intelligent man. That is recommendation enough.