In 1959, Norman Holmes Pearson, a friend of the poet H.D.’s as well as her literary executor, asked Robert Duncan whether he would write up something for the older author on the occasion of her birthday. Duncan, who considered H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961) to be a spiritual and poetic initiatrix of sorts, agreed. Over the next five years, his tribute blossomed, or metastasized, into The H.D. Book, a hefty and digressive meditation on modernism, literature, and esoterica whose twenty-odd chapters appeared individually in a menagerie of mostly obscure literary journals. Given Duncan’s love of the serial form, it is

In a recent interview, Grace Krilanovich revealed that she mapped out the story line of The Orange Eats Creeps, her first novel, by drawing cards at random from a homemade deck. This explains, at least in part, the chaotic energy behind this beautiful and deranged book, in which a nameless teenage vampire travels through Oregon in the early 1990s, doing drugs, searching for her missing foster sister, going to hardcore shows, and preying on men when they aren’t preying on her. The narrator claims to have ESP and spends much of the novel channeling Patty Reed, the young Donner Party

Early in A Voice from Old New York, a posthumous memoir by Louis Auchincloss, who died last January, the author relates, in typically breezy manner, an anecdote about “my richest friend and contemporary, Marshall Field IV.” The Chicago newspaperman’s death in 1965, from a drug overdose, was the result of Field’s “tragic inheritance,” writes Auchincloss. He’s not referring to the hand-me-down wealth and privilege that so often hollow out great families, but to the “nervous troubles” that plagued Field’s father and presumably led his grandfather to suicide. “The story of the Fields is like that of the House of Atreus,”

Christian Hawkey’s hard-to-classify Ventrakl puts prose, poetry, and photographs to fascinating work as he attempts to draw closer to the early-twentieth-century German writer Georg Trakl. Trakl was more than slightly enigmatic in his own day—Great War medic, pharmacist, drug addict, blisteringly gifted Expressionist poet, and suicide at twenty-seven—and Hawkey (whose previous work includes the 2007 poetry collection Citizen Of) manages with great resourcefulness to both mitigate and highlight the cultural and linguistic gap between himself and his long-dead predecessor.

“I left Claude, the French rat.”

German-Austrian novelist Daniel Kehlmann’s Fame is a Nabokovian puzzle, a game of hide-and-seek, and a playful reflection on cultural renown and the lack thereof. Told in nine episodes that initially appear discrete but then rapidly connect with one another, the book focuses on three celebrities, three nobodies, and a minor author named Leo Richter, who early on speaks of a novel with a “narrative arc, but no main character.” Another character critiques Richter’s fiction, thinking it “full of complicated mirror effects and unpredictable shifts and swerves that were flourishes of empty virtuosity.” That the work described above sounds a lot

Admirers of the great Howard Jacobson have made a parlor game of accounting for why he’s not been recognized as one of the most absorbing and intelligent Anglophone novelists. It beggars the imagination to think that the man who wrote The Mighty Walzer (1999) has won no major accolade in award-mad Britain and has barely appeared in print in the States. So, some possibilities: He’s been written off as a mere comic novelist, and a smut-peddling comedian at that; he’s impolitely Jewish, his sentences lousy with Yiddish; and he laments the state of British culture in a weekly Independent column.

Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, published in 2007, is a work of clean and seamless guile. There’s no messy and cumbersome interiority, no ruminating, no sociopolitical context, nor much context at all. Just a contemporary city (London), rendered soberly by an unnamed narrator with a metaphysical problem: He’s had a terrible accident of some kind, feels inauthentic as a result, and proceeds to reenact events of escalating complexity in order to recapture a kind of “rightness,” of time coinciding with itself in an idealized manner. He tries to describe his own post-traumatic condition but has little insight, nothing but a feeling