Kruso

This new German novel is dense, allusive, and seemingly endless. Also ponderous, dour, solemn, and humorless.

Bardo or Not Bardo

As an explanatory text on the Bardo, Antoine Volodine's seven connected stories are useful and interesting. As literature, Bardo or Not Bardo can be diffuse, obscurantist, and tedious.

Improvise from Inside Out

Mick Napier's ideas on improvisation are mostly free of the rule-based and cult-like approaches found in Truth in Comedy. The word "truth" in the title should have been a tipoff. Napier, in contrast, emphasizes just doing something, anything, committing to it, and sustaining and building the energy of the scene. This is an altogether more fun, yet paradoxically challenging, notion.

Dictator

Dictator concludes Robert Harris's compelling series of three novels centered around the life and career of Cicero. As orator, philosopher and politician, Cicero has much to teach readers 2,000 years later, but such wisdom is wasted on those who cannot or will not hear.

Doctorow: Collected Stories

In this final book by E.L. Doctorow, containing 15 stories, there is a not a single word out of place. Every sentence is finely wrought. It also shows the author's mastery of various styles and unfailingly gives that short story "click" on the final page that is like a catharsis.