• Salon's guide to Nobel winner Doris Lessing

    Novelist, memoirist, activist, fantasist -- this entry from "The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors" takes you on a guided tour of the celebrated writer's long literary career.
    By Laura Morgan Green October 12, 2007

  • The reluctant feminist

    Nobel-winner Doris Lessing has shrugged off feminist interpretations of her work -- with good reason.
    By Carol Lloyd October 12, 2007

  • Phallus doesn't live here anymore

    Philip Roth's aging alter ego returns to New York to confront his unrealizable lust and his fear that "reading/writing people" may be finished.
    By Brendan Bernhard October 4, 2007

  • The intruder

    A sexy Croatian college student disrupts the lives of a family of well-meaning New York liberals in Valerie Martin's "Trespass."
    By Laura Miller October 1, 2007

  • War without end

    Best known for his tales of losers, thieves and addicts, Denis Johnson takes on the Vietnam War in his daring new novel, "Tree of Smoke."
    By Laura Miller September 17, 2007

  • "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"

    Junot Díaz's long-awaited debut novel is a portrait of the artist as a nerdy young Latino -- as well as a tribute to Tolkien, magic realism and Dominican history.
    By Roland Kelts September 12, 2007

  • "Engleby"

    The narrator of Sebastian Faulks' enthralling new novel is a witty, unreliable oddball -- but is he a murderer?
    By Laura Miller September 7, 2007

  • Life beyond the lens

    New novels frame two of photography's most compelling legends, Edward Curtis and Edward Steichen.
    By Sarah Karnasiewicz August 2, 2007

  • "The Headmaster Ritual"

    Move over, "Prep" and "Harry Potter" -- Taylor Antrim has written the great American (or is that Korean-American?) boarding school novel.
    By Ed Park August 1, 2007

  • Summer reads

    Chic lit: From a saga of 17th century maidens to a 21st century mom flirting with disaster, our novel recommendations will make you feel cheap and sexy in the best possible way.
    By Salon staff June 11, 2007

  • "On Chesil Beach"

    Two virgins face down fear and disgust on their wedding night in Ian McEwan's slender new novel.
    By Ed Park June 5, 2007

  • "After Dark"

    In Haruki Murakami's cinematic new novel, night owls wander the streets of Tokyo, unaware of the web of coincidences that connects them.
    By Laura Miller May 30, 2007

  • "The Namesake"

    This sweet, but not cloying, adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's delicate novel brings us some wonderful moments.
    By Stephanie Zacharek March 9, 2007

  • The unbearable rightness of fiction

    In his forceful new book, Milan Kundera argues that we need the novel to understand the "ineluctable defeat called life."
    By Gary Kamiya March 6, 2007

  • I'm not afraid of writing, but I am afraid of publishing

    Some nameless fear stands between me and my desire to be heard.
    By Cary Tennis February 28, 2007

  • I don't feel like writing. Does that mean I'm not a writer?

    Every time I start to work on my second novel, an enormous laziness descends upon me.
    By Cary Tennis February 26, 2007

  • "Travels in the Scriptorium"

    When Paul Auster is at his best he's like a brilliant magician. When he's not -- as with his latest -- it's as if he's sawing away without a woman in the box.
    By Allen Barra February 7, 2007

  • "Sacred Games"

    Vikram Chandra's exquisite cops and robbers tale breaks the mold of the contemporary Indian novel, bringing Mumbai -- in all its chaos -- gloriously to life.
    By Laura Miller February 5, 2007

  • "The End of Mr. Y"

    Scarlett Thomas' novel dabbles in Derrida and Darwin, but her story of a screwed-up grad student obsessed with a cursed book never gets bogged down.
    By Laura Miller January 18, 2007

  • The fall of the house of Pynchon

    Slogging through the science and history, sex and paranoia that crowd Thomas Pynchon's cartoonish new novel, it's obvious his disciples now write better Big Idea novels than he does.
    By Laura Miller November 21, 2006

  • "The Uses of Enchantment"

    In her multifold new novel, Heidi Julavits sends up self-help and female victimhood through the story of a girl who may have faked her own kidnapping.
    By Marisa Meltzer October 17, 2006

  • Kirkus shrugged

    I spent years writing my novel -- and daydreaming of critical acclaim. Now the reviews are in. Apparently, it's terrible.
    By Michael Laser September 28, 2006

  • "Icelander"

    This wonderful new novel from McSweeney's is a twisty murder mystery with rich overtones of Nabokov, Norse mythology and pomo fiction.
    By Laura Miller August 11, 2006

  • "Talk Talk"

    Only T.C. Boyle could pull off this literary thriller about a deaf woman determined to confront the man who stole her identity.
    By Laura Miller July 21, 2006

  • "Theft"

    A painter in dire straits, his simple brother and a ravishing femme fatale light up prizewinning author Peter Carey's masterly new art-world mystery.
    By Laura Miller May 10, 2006
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