Much as Alan Furst likes historical fiction and World War II, he struggles mightily to breathe life into wooden characters.

Here's a fictionalized Woody Allen parody that's actually wonderfully funny.

Vaclav Havel is a one-man anecdote machine in this recollection of his Czech presidential years.

Flanagan's hopelessly implausible terrorist yarn puts pole dancers and Bush-bashing in the same seething kettle.

Michael Gold has written an partly-autobiographical screed about growing up as a Jew in Manhattan of 1900.

Kapuscinksi uses his love for the Roman historian to filter the follies of contemporary upheavals and civil wars.

A postwar one-night (marriage) stand goes deeply awry, but that's really the least of it.

Among the finest human condition metaphors of recent time, Saramago's conjures sudden mass blindness to captivating effect.

Brilliant, moody, angry, Roberto Clemente was a gifted athlete who changed the way Latinos were perceived.

A Japanese cellist with an automatic weapon in the Panama Canal zone? Sure. It's Iain Banks, after all.

Is she or isn't mine? That's the question Antonio Muñoz Molina gets at in this subversive little novel about love.