The Waterworks

E.L. Doctorow's novel, set in New York's Boss Tweed era, opens with the mystery of a missing freelance reporter and unfolds into a sinister and gothic tale worthy of Poe.

The Groucho Letters

Groucho Marx's letters will not produce gales of laughter, however they do show him to be intelligent and perceptive. His dinner with T.S. Eliot is one of the high points of this volume. 

The Black Swan

Thomas Mann's late novella addresses the desperate delusions arising from a woman's loss of youth. It makes a suitable bookend with Death in Venice.

Scat

Carl Hiaasen's YA novel is a pleasant diversion for readers of all ages, with timely themes of habitat loss and rampant development.

Tough Guys Don't Dance

The story in this Norman Mailer novel put me in mind of the 1946 film version of The Big Sleep: The plot is both labyrinthine and not all that important to the finished product. Tough Guys is a neo-noir with plenty of drinking, dames, and sex. The prose quality exceeds the standards of the genre, making it a fascinating hybrid.

Catastrophe and Other Stories

Dino Buzzati's The Tartar Steppe is one of a handful of novels whose impact on me will never fade, so I was eager to read this collection of short stories. What comes through, in addition to the supernatural and bizarre effects, is Buzzati's keen and penetrating understanding of the mass mind, especially in "The Scala Scare." Herd mentality, willful disbelief of obvious facts, pursuits of chimeras -- these are the ways humans engineer their own downfalls, and Buzzati is there to point a finger, with just the merest trace of a smirk on his lips.