By Todd Shy
We know the Nazis either as monsters in jackboots or as banal bureaucrats just following orders.  They are Auschwitz demons or Nuremberg fools.

Jonathan Littell’s sprawling novel “The Kindly Ones,” winner of two prestigious literary awards in France, makes a daring, disturbing attempt to deny such ethical shortcuts:  “There was a lot of talk, after the war,” the book’s narrator observes, “in trying to explain what had happened, about inhumanity.  But I am sorry, there is no such thing as inhumanity.  There is only humanity and more humanity.”

By Janet Maslin
The New York Times
As part of Canongate's series of short novels based on myths, "The Fire Gospel" is nominally linked to the story of Prometheus. Like Prometheus, Michel Faber's main character steals something incendiary and is terribly punished for his transgression. But Faber's hapless Canadian linguistic scholar, Theo Griepenkerl, does not suffer the Promethean fate of being chained to a rock and having his liver repeatedly devoured by a bird of prey. His is a different kind of pain. In keeping with Faber's more modern idea of torment, Theo has to contend with Amazon.com's idiotic customer reviews of his book.

In this era of self-promotion when even Philip Roth grants interviews and almost every lesser author dreams of appearing on Oprah, it's almost hard to believe that author's once bolstered their fame by becoming recluses.

Thomas Pynchon has mastered this disappearing act but even his effort pales before that J.D. Salinger. For almost five decades we've heard barely a peep from "The Catcher in the Rye" author, except for sporadic legal efforts to force others to leave him alone. As Salinger nears his 90th birthday, Charles McGrath of the New York Times offers this compelling appreciation of the great Invisible Man of American letters.

By Michael Upchurch
Seattle Times
‘Rancid Pansies” is the third installment in British author James Hamilton-Paterson’s campy comic saga about hack writer and self-styled “culinary genius” Gerald Samper. At this stage, trying to bring readers up to date on Gerry’s misadventures is a bit like attempting to make sense of a Fellini dream sequence.

By Todd Shy
In her acclaimed 1987 novel "Beloved," Toni Morrison wrote about the legacies of slavery like a disturbed oracle: The narrative itself seemed to shudder. Only a mythical telling, the book suggested, was adequate for a tragedy of that scope.

In the Nobel laureate's latest novel, "A Mercy," Morrison is still out to trace the roots of black experience in America. However this time, by searching the country's early Colonial days, telling overlapping stories of slave and free, European, African and Native American characters, she more subtly exposes contradictions that have been part of the American dream from the outset. If "Beloved" was written in a prophet's voice, "A Mercy" is the work of an elderly sage.

By Todd Shy
"2666" may be the first great novel of the 21st century, and the author didn't get to finish it. Roberto Bolaño died of liver disease in 2003 at 50, leaving a daredevil epic that is lyrical and stark, decadent and soaring, a sandstorm in which the author refuses to blink, the novel Tolstoy might have written if he had hoboed around the modern world, casting off history's last inhibitions. A lot of very good novels suddenly seem timid in this one's wake.

By Hephzibah Anderson
Bloomberg News
A devout Hindu mother is bathing in the Ganges when a schooner hulks into view with dazzling white sails and a figurehead of a long-billed bird. She has never seen such a ship. Terrified by this apparition, she rushes home to sketch the image and place it in her puja room of gods.