Scott Turow may be one of his generation’s most successful writers of thrillers, but he’s a lot more like William Faulkner than Raymond Chandler. Like the Mississippi master, Turow has set most of his 13 novels in a single fictional place – he calls his Yoknapatawpha Kindle County. But unlike many genre writers, he doesn’t focus on a single hero. Instead, characters from Kindle weave in and out of his books, with different ones getting star turns.

If you love a knotty spy thriller, check out the latest gem from Top Ten contributor William Boyd, Gabriel’s Moon. Set in London, Spain, Africa and behind the Iron Curtain during the early 1960s, it’s intricate plot will grip you and keep you guessing. 

Nobody seems to plays it straight, except, perhaps, for our hero, a successful travel writer named Gabriel Dax, who is haunted by fragmentary and probably false memories of the fire that left him an orphan when he was six. 

What do we really know? Who can we really trust? Good questions!

There’s only a tiny handful of Americans writers whose skill is so deep and imagination so wide that they seem to reinvent themselves with every book — whose truly amazing talent lead us to wonder with bated breath “What will they do next?”

We are sad to learn of the death of Paul Auster.

The New York Times reports that “the prolific novelist, memoirist and screenwriter who rose to fame in the 1980s with his postmodern reanimation of the noir novel and who endured to become one of the signature New York writers of his generation, died of complications from lung cancer at his home in Brooklyn on Tuesday evening. He was 77.”

Appreciation of Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Green House by David Anthony Durham

I remember wandering through the world literature section of my university library, feeling a bit lost, recognizing few names. On the recommendation of my writing instructor I was searching for a Peruvian novelist named Mario Vargas Llosa. I found a coverless edition of The Green House, one with no blurbs, no review quotes, no author photo or biography. The surprises found inside, then, were complete and unforgettable.

Appreciation of Jacques Roumain’s Masters of the Dew by Edwidge Danticat

This novel charmed Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook so much that when they visited Haiti in the 1940s they decided to translate it. Theirs remains the only English translation. This is the plot: A Haitian young man goes to Cuba to cut sugarcane in the 1930s. When he returns to his village in rural Haiti, he finds that a drought has ravaged the entire area and a Romeo and Juliet–type feud between the two most powerful families stands in the community’s way of finding a solution.

Appreciation of François Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel by Fred Chappell

The stories of the giant Gargantua and his giant son Pantagruel, of their birth, nurture, education, and heroic feats of arms; of Pantagruel’s voyages through strange lands and exotic cultures in search of ultimate wisdom; of their companions Rondibilis, Frère Jean, and the irrepressible, inexpressible Panurge; of their arriving at last in the abode of the Priestess Bacbuc whose oracular Bottle utters the final truth they have sought —these stories are impossible to summarize and set in order.

Appreciation of Elena Poniatowska’s La Flor de Lis by Sandra Cisneros

The little hand serving me coffee is also the hand that wrote the exquisite novel La Flor de Lis (1988). It seems absurd a writer of such worth should bother serving coffee to anyone, but it’s precisely this humility, this willingness to serve others, whether it be coffee, or novels, or testimonies, or tamales, that makes Elena Poniatowska a writer as well loved by cab drivers as by professors. The title alludes to France, but if you’re hip to Mexico City, you’ll know La Flor de Lis is also the famous tamale restaurant in la colonia Condesa.

Appreciation of Stendhal’s “The Life of Henri Brulard” by William Boyd