Charlotte Roche
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Justin E. H. Smith

If Roche has hit on something true and heretofore unsaid, it is that to write about bodily fluids is not to describe something exceptional in the course of human life. It is rather to describe something that is always there and always felt to be there, through all those other things people do and experience at that level that used to be the subject of novels (falling in love, challenging others to duels, talking about the buying and selling of land, etc.).

Alex Ross
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Nikil Saval

What Adorno gave us in his many writings on new music was a way of seeing history in a piece of music where it might be most absent. It was a way of trying to do what Ross is reluctant to do: understand and define progress in the arts. Ross divests himself of a correlate way of explaining history—at least, history that is not totalitarian or "New Deal" era history—and so we stop hearing the 20^th century in the music.

Roberto Bolaño
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Giles Harvey

Bolaño seems to be throwing his hands up in the face of the horrors he describes: he can make no more sense of them than the characters in his book. I have suggested that the book is a failure. Yet to call it a failure seems somehow tautological: Bolaño's imagination was underwritten by the idea that every human impulse is ultimately thwarted, cancelled, and destroyed.

Anne Rice
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Rachel Aviv

Rice's tales were embraced as allegories for gay life: alienated and often genderless, her vampires were initiated into a secret subculture in which they could finally be free. They perpetuated their species by sucking the blood of mortals—a tender interaction that left them trembling with arousal.

Per Petterson
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Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn

Petterson takes profound pleasure in descriptions of physical labor and the basic mechanics of the body. There are extended scenes of felling woods for timber, of threshing hay, of lighting worn stoves and cooking potatoes and systematically setting tables. He is methodical, and he makes manual activity exquisitely sensual.

John Updike
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Nathan Heller

Updike is often cast as a chronicler of the American middle. To describe him that way, though, is to look through the wrong end of the telescope. Updike wrote about people like Updike, and it was his stroke of luck that as the Sixties unfolded, people like Updike—old enough to have a settled vision of the world, young enough to change, suburban enough to care about the Sunday congregation more than, say, hipster ontology—became not just a middle ground but a national thermometer. Read More