Georges Perec’s embargo on the etc. is something that comes to mind whenever I read the work of Ivan Vladislavić. There’s the refusal to shirk or abbreviate the everyday, and a punctilious, editorializing attention to the smallest effects of one’s own prose.

Most critics discussing Hilary Mantel’s dual Booker Prize–winning Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, acknowledge the embarrassing reputation of historical novels before quickly moving on to reassure us of the author’s genius. But it is worth pausing for a moment to consider the problematic genre, from its nineteenth-century incarnations to the present day. Why does the modern historical novel so often seem like a failed project, whether in aesthetic or political terms, and how are Mantel’s novels different?

Fiction has more than one way of distancing itself from the real. In most cases this distance serves as a prelude to a future homecoming. The story, like some interstellar traveler, flings itself around the gravity well of a larger and more distant planetary object (the fictional) in order to assure the speed and accuracy of its return to the space that domesticates it (the real).

The recent publication of yet another big novel centrally preoccupied with popular music—Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue—invites consideration of what Rick Moody has recently observed is the surprisingly ubiquitous presence, in recent literary fiction, of “the popular song.” The common denominator of contemporary pop-obsessed novels is, however, less the song than the recording: vinyl LP, cassette tape, compact disc, Mp3 file.

In the past few years it’s gotten so you can’t go to the movies without finding onscreen a burly guy dressed as Ernest Hemingway, cavorting with women wearing shingled hair and calf-length skirts. Everywhere filmgoers turn, flappers and gangsters and accent coaches abound. Culturally, we’re experiencing an intense fetish for the 1920s and ’30s that shows no sign of abating. As a scholar specializing in the literature of that period, I must say I’m tickled.

Where were you when JFK was assassinated? This is the first of eleven discussion questions appended to the new paperback edition of 11/22/63, Stephen King’s time-travel novel. The questions precede other Book Club Kit features designed to help groups of readers “travel back” to the period: a Q & A with the author, a playlist of popular music from the late fifties and early sixties, chosen and annotated by King, and a collection of classic Cold War recipes taken from the 75th Anniversary Edition of the Joy of Cooking. A nice touch, all of this, but strangely redundant: if the date in question immediately signifies to you from the book jacket, as it’s clearly meant to, you probably remember the food and music of the period without prompting.

Few recent novelists offer as many misguided reasons for being liked or disliked than Edward St. Aubyn, whose five Patrick Melrose novels have been the occasion of some glowing press. Sensationalism is the first reason many might embrace or dismiss him. Raped repeatedly by his father from the age of five, a heroin addict in his 20s running rapidly through the family money, disinherited in adulthood by a mother who finds in New Age charities absolution for her complicity in her son’s abuse, Patrick Melrose is all too inviting a subject for traumatophiles.

For hard-core fans of Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic—and we are legion—the publication this year of Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama is a major event.

Every line of Antigonick is printed in boldface handwriting, emphatic, as if something urgent and excessive has to be loudly said. The title and the format suggest that this is a translation of Sophocles’s Antigone with illustrations. From the start, however, contemporary elements intervene: stage directions are inserted within brackets, characters cite contemporary critics, and the scenes are referred to as “episodes,” reminding us how even the contemporary television series has a precedent in ancient Greece.

In 2002, the Kremlin-affiliated youth group Moving Together staged a public protest on Moscow’s Theater Square at which they threw the works of several prominent Russian postmodernist authors into an outsized papier-mâché toilet. In particular, they accused Vladimir Sorokin, who had achieved great acclaim in the preceding decade for his rather dense brand of conceptualist writing, of peddling pornography. In response to this and other public attacks, Sorokin sat down to write what became his most aesthetically accessible and overtly political novel: the dystopian satire Day of the Oprichnik.

I came late to Doris Lessing. Although it was back in 1962 that The Golden Notebook established her as the Cassandra of a not-quite-revolutionary generation, I clued in to Lessing’s brilliance only a decade ago. Formally inventive, prescient about the “personal is political” debates that came to dominate the Left, The Golden Notebook explored the political, spiritual, sexual, and psychic tribulations of communists and their comrades, both in the Third World and the West.

The English-speaking world has canonized Roberto Bolaño with astonishing rapidity. It’s not surprising that this consecration has begun to provoke skepticism among Spanish-speaking critics who concede Bolaño’s importance but detect a condescension to Latin American writing in the fervor of the Anglo acclaim.

When Capital was published in Great Britain earlier this year, it was immediately heralded as the first important novel about the recent financial crisis. But Capital was also heralded as something else, as the “Great English Novel of the Millennium.”

Two recent books give new spins on the artist’s life: both writers had raging youths but one got famous and one didn’t. Jeanette Winterson and Eileen Myles, tough, smart, ambitious women who escaped the hard-laboring worlds into which they were born, grapple with what it means to seek literary fame.

What’s ordinary these days in fiction (at least Anglo-American fiction) is the lives and loves of two or three school chums, what happens to them as they wander out into the post-school world, what secrets emerge and how their relationships get rearranged. You’ve seen this pattern recently (think The Sense of an Ending), maybe more than once in the last twelve months (think The Marriage Plot). It’s often very readable, especially if you’ve gone to the same sort of school. But given the state of the world, greater ambitions could be imagined.

Last fall Public Books sponsored a lively roundtable discussion of Amy Waldman’s widely praised novel The Submission, which considers what might have happened if the winner of an anonymous architectural design competition for a Ground Zero memorial had been an American Muslim.

In The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides asks what would happen if nineteenth-century literature married twentieth-century theory, and the result is many brilliant novels in one: a romance, a coming-of-age story, a travelogue, an account of madness, and a tale of religious quest.