Success greeted the Japanese author Shotaro Yasuoka, now nearly 90, immediately upon the publication of the short stories that make up The Glass Slipper and Other Stories. With frugal, occasionally lyrical prose (translated by Royall Tyler), these works, from the early 1950s, prize emotional and psychological depth over narrative propulsion [...]

After the difficulty I faced finding this book, I finally found a copy of The Emperor’s Children at Strand Books last week, and devoured it over the weekend. It skewers the pretensions of people who are young, overeducated, and trapped in the Manhattan media echo chamber, yet I couldn’t help but have sympathy for its [...]

On the plane yesterday I read James Salter’s Last Night, a slim collection of stories in which each tale would seem too brief were it not for the author’s aptitude for compression. More than any other fiction I’ve read in the past few years, the stories possess a quality I identify as “adult”—the light in [...]

At the train station in Malmö, Sweden, I picked up the Virago paperback edition of Gilead, Marilyn Robinson’s “demanding, grave, and lucid” 2004 novel. (It was published by FSG in the US.) There was a twenty-three-year gap between this book and Housekeeping, her 1981 debut, and, as many commentators have noted, it was worth the [...]

Last week, while idly flipping through the current issue of Open City at the end of a long workday, I came across David Nutt’s short story, titled “Melancholera.” It chronicles, in first-person narration, the pendular swings from sickness to health of a young boy suffering from lupus, Lyme disease, spinal meningitis, and other serious maladies. [...]