Reading a book about reading books is like entering a hall of mirrors: the experience is at once fascinating and disturbing. Like other stories about books and writing, The Book Censor’s Library drags the reader into itself, claiming to be one kind of book but unexpectedly (and imperceptibly) turning into another. Even the title throws…

Forcing people to live in a gilded cage in order to harvest their organs and experiment on them: not a particularly original plot for a dystopia, of course, but still a fascinating vehicle for social critique. Swedish author Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) or the film The Island (2005), tells the story of middle-aged…

Adrian Nathan West Leavetaking by Peter Weiss, tr. Christopher Levinson (Melville House) Peter Weiss has been the most important prose discovery for me this year. A figure of extraordinary individual integrity, Weiss inquires as to the nature of his being and his relation to the transitoriness of life with a lack of ostentation almost inconceivable…

At just under 250 pages, Rainey Royal is an intense and at times disturbing story about a girl growing up in New York during the 1970s and ’80s. Her father, a famous jazz musician, allows his groupies the run of their brownstone, leaving Rainey constantly fighting for privacy and some degree of normalcy. Casual sex…