Roberto Bolaño's understated Rome-set novella is a posthumous example of the Chilean writer's genius.

In Jesse Ball's unsettling novel, suicide has a "cure" of sorts, but the price is profoundly surreal.

Donald Barthelme's controlled zaniness helped paved the way for the likes of George Saunders and China Miéville.

The brilliant and ambitious Mexican Valeria Luiselli tries far too hard in her debut novel.

Graham Swift's latest novel is a morally generous remembrance of a housemaid-turned-author.

Georges Simenon's novel of occupied France revels in the squalor that stands for collaboration.

Olga Grushin's semi-autobiographical novel weighs in on missed opportunities.

Roberto Arlt's doomsday vision of Buenos Aires in the late 1920s beat the Beat Generation to the punch.

Dag Solstad's slender novel is a luminously intelligent look at a man's middle age crisis.

Rachel Cusk's novel, "a reverse kind of exposition," beautifully subverts structure, but it hurts.

Adam Johnson's latest story collection "celebrates" the United States of Death, Dying and the Surreal.