Elizabeth Strout is one of the keenest chroniclers of daily life and family interactions writing today. In The Burgess Boys, the excellent follow-up to her 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning Olive Kitteridge, she splits her screen between small small-town Maine and New York City, particularly Park Slope, Brooklyn, to brilliant effect.

Susan Burgess Olson is divorced and still living in Shirley Falls, where she grew up,  but her twin brother, Bob, and older brother and the family star, Jim, both lawyers, have moved on to big city life, one more successfully than the other. The incident that initiates the novel – a crime or a prank, and we’re never quite sure which, by Susan’s son Zach – brings the siblings together. Of course, “together” is a word with multiple meanings, as many and as varied as the frictions among these siblings. Bob and Susan are in contact again after a long hiatus and we get to see some of what underlies the chilliness between them. Jim, set apart by age and celebrity, is supposed to be the shining light and assumes center stage. Yet he is not quite able to live up to expectations, either his own or those of others.

But Strout takes on more than the family’s issues and hidden secrets. The town of Shirley Falls has recently become home to many immigrant Somalis, and Zach has rolled the head of a frozen pig into their mosque during Ramadan, defiling the prayer rugs and putting himself into the precarious position of being accused of a hate crime. It’s a good thing that he has two uncles who are lawyers. Or is it? The novel uncovers not only family dynamics but the ways in which a history of betrayals and reversals affects individuals on a daily basis.

Strout’s characters are so richly drawn that the reader would easily recognize Bob sitting at his favorite Park Slope bar and acknowledge him as a fond acquaintance. Jim and his wife, Helen, may be more recognizable as types, but types we know intimately. Ultimately, there is an underlying and undeniable sadness about these people, the key to which threads through the novel and makes them all the more plausible and memorable.

Bob’s ex-wife Pam, when she first met the siblings, was moved to bake cookies and cakes for the Burgesses because she was always touched by the idea that “these kids had been starved all their lives for sweetness.” In the course of this novel, Strout offers the reader a taste of what sweetness is for each of the characters, at least for the ones who are willing to open their hearts to change. And once you’ve gotten to know them, the characters in The Burgess Boys will stay with you for a long time.

Jeff Baron has started a new literary adventure with his novel I Represent Sean Rosen. Already an accomplished and frequently produced playwright – his play Visiting Mr. Green is regularly staged around the world – Baron shows in his first novel the keen ear of a playwright, one perfectly attuned to his character’s voice.

And what a voice it is. Sean Rosen, the first-person narrator, is a thirteen-year-old aspiring writer/screenwriter and idea man – he has come up with a concept that will revolutionize the entertainment industry – but first he has to be heard. This is not an easy feat for a boy in middle school, but Sean is no ordinary boy. He is smart, endearing, and ingeniously inventive and creative, not to mention a pretty accomplished researcher and an avid reader of The Hollywood Reporter.

Not exactly a loner, Sean is choosy about who he hangs with. There are his friends, Javier, Buzz, and Ethan and, as in every middle schooler’s life, a bully, in this case named Doug. And I can’t leave out the effervescently spoiled little princess, Brianna, who appears pretty much only in texts. Yes, Sean is a part of the generation that considers cell phones, computers, and earbuds extensions of their bodies.

Sean is an intriguing mix of boy and adult, as are most boys of his age, especially in 2013. He is instinctive about his parents, whom he understands and clearly loves but not enough to confide his artistic aspirations, and he is clear-eyed about his grandparents, who play an intriguing role in the novel. More importantly, he is in the process of becoming himself, an adolescent approaching adulthood and independence who can say out loud (at least to his readers) that he likes buying his favorite ice cream with his own money.

Sean is entrepreneurial in a variety of ways, one of which is that he creates podcasts on varying themes from donuts to hair for which he interviews people. He tells us about these in the novel and readers can see and hear them at SeanRosen.comwww.seanrosen.com. I don’t know who does Sean’s voice, but it is now the voice I hear when I think of the book: eager, funny, and maybe just a little pushy.

Baron’s fast-paced writing manages to capture not only a brilliant voice but also to convey the humor, affection, and frustration a smart and funny thirteen-year-old has for the life around him. We don’t find out what Sean’s revolutionary concept is – maybe that’s for the next book – but Sean does create a movie idea that he pitches via Skype to big studio executives with the help of his invented manager, Dan Welch. And they love it! This is every creative kid’s dream scenario in a book that will delight any teen who dares to dream big.

"The men of Bravo are not cold" is the first sentence of Ben Fountain's novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, and indeed this group of men is hot, very hot. Everyone wants a piece of them since they've become heroes via the Fox news coverage of their exploits in Iraq. They are on a Victory Tour, and as the novel begins the eight American heroes have arrived at their last stop, a Dallas Cowboys game, the setting for the entire book. But this is by no means a war novel; rather it is an anti-war novel, not as a polemic, but as an amazingly vivid and incisive portrait of contemporary America on a wide variety of levels.

Through the innocent eyes of Billy Lynn, a modern American Adam if there ever was one, we witness a parade of American archetypes, from hucksters to believers -- and sometimes it's tough to tell the difference. The men of Bravo have become a commodity, and, as is true of all things salable in America, they are pushed, prodded, and packaged from every side. There is the Hollywood movie producer Albert, always on his cell phone, who has the brilliant idea of turning their exploits into a Hilary Swank movie, much to the doubting dismay of some of the men. But of course, they are eager to be the subject of a movie, and there is the illusive promise of a monetary payoff.

Then there is the Dallas Cowboys' owner, Norm Oglesby, or "the Normster," one of the richest men in America, known for "his willingness to whore out the Cowboys brand to everything from toasters to tulip bulbs." He is trotting the men of Bravo onto the field at halftime, seducing them with the chance for cheers from the crowd and the opportunity to be near Beyonce and Destiny's Child. And speaking of seduction, Billy's encounter with an entrepreneurial Cowboys cheerleader is one of the more thrilling and revealing scenes of male-female interaction in recent literature.

Brand names, from products to movie stars, are scattered through this novel, which skewers everything from self-righteous preachers to hustlers, in what is one of the most forceful examinations of how the messages from sponsors and media advertising has driven us all to desire our fifteen seconds of fame. But Billy's story, and the present-tense vividness of it, goes much deeper than some of the satire in the novel. He is, in truth, the salt of the earth and a valuable young man with his life ahead of him, if he doesn't get killed in Iraq where he is due to return the day after the game. The reader's heart goes out to Billy's sister Kathryn, whose one aim is to help him survive.

Fountain has written a novel that tells us a good deal about ourselves in our current state of mind, and the tale is told with great style and energy. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk has left me longing for the next novel from a wonderful writer.

Normally I find novels narrated by teenagers too cute or too self-consciously precocious, yet Maria Semple hits exactly the right note with her narrator Bee (Balakrishna) Branch. But what adds to the allure is that the voice of this endearing fifteen-year-old is not the only narrative mode here, for Where'd You Go, Bernadette is truly a hyper-contemporary epistolary novel. E-mails, handwritten notes, missives from the Galer Street School's principal, and snail-mail letters combine with Bee's first-person narrative to create remarkably vivid characters and a wildly entertaining and suspenseful plotline.

Bee's mother and father, Bernadette Fox and Elgin Branch, are not typical parents in any sense of the word. Elgin, or Elgie as he is affectionately known, is a Microsoft lead researcher, very high up in the hierarchy, while Bernadette was once a brilliant, MacArthur Genius-anointed architect in Los Angeles, who has left her profession and her art behind for reasons that the novel seeks to unravel.

Fittingly, the Branch/Fox family has never lived in a so-called "normal" environment. In LA they lived in the Beeber Bifocal factory, transformed by Bernadette into a very unusual home. The move to Seattle landed them in an equally unconventional home, the former Straight Gate School for Girls, a onetime Catholic school for wayward girls, "a grand but decrepit brick building" with a leaky ceiling and an unsavory history. It's easy to see these homes as working metaphors for the family's oddity and also for its uniqueness. Bee would not give up a minute of this lifestyle, even when she complains and rolls her eyes as her mother derides the locals, whom she calls "gnats." Little in Seattle is safe from Bernadette's mockery.

But sarcasm does not rule the day here, although that and a large heaping of humor help alleviate some of the core emptiness in the Branch's lives. They have been through a lot -- many miscarriages followed by Bee's premature birth with heart defects, Bernadette's feelings of professional betrayal, and Elgin's workaholic immersion. They go through even more in the pages of this novel. Highlights include the comical encounters with their neighbor Audrey Griffin and her Blackberry "abatement specialist," the clichéd and hilarious shenanigans of the parents and teachers at Bee's private school, and the Victims Against Victimhood meetings that Elgie's assistant, Soo-Lin Lee-Segal, attends. While Bernadette hides behind dark glasses and relies on a virtual assistant from India to carry out her daily activities, Elgie's assistant attempts to work her way into his heart -- clearly, the family's center cannot hold.

There is great depth of heart in the novel alongside the humor. The final section, which takes place on a long-planned family excursion to Antarctica, turns into a mythic, somewhat absurd search for the mother while offering a revelation of what family is all about, even if it is the wacky, genius variety of family. It is so easy to fall in love with this novel.

The soulful man who gazes out at the reader from the cover of the must-read memoir Who I Am may seem at odds with the enfant terrible, guitar-smashing version of Pete Townshend the public might envision. In fact, in the course of this remarkably touching and very naked self-exploration, this photo of the man who takes you in beyond blue eyes is the perfect image of Townshend.

Townshend begins his mesmerizing story with his earliest memories, beginning with his parents, his mother a singer and father a horn player. He then introduces his grandmother Denny, a complex and dark character with whom he was sent to live for a year in an attempt to “sort her out.” (Needless to say this was an impossible task for a six-year-old.) Of course, later on, sex, drugs, and rock and roll all appear -- in abundance. The other members of The Who, The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, Eddie Vedder, and many more all make appearances. Most stirring are Townshend’s characterizations of the people to whom he was close and about whom he cared most. Keith Moon, Roger Daltrey, and John Entwistle along with his family comprise the most evocative portraits. But Townshend has clear moments of insight about many others, including Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp (The Who’s managers) and other longtime associates.

Still, it is Townshend's reticence to see himself in the way others might see him that is most alluring. In detailing his days as an art student, enthralled by Gustav Metzger and his theories of auto-destructive art, to his struggles and successes with creating songs for The Who, along with full-length song cycles and what is probably the most successful rock opera of all time, Tommy, Townshend is in many ways cerebral and unexpectedly measured in his self-evaluation.

It is often difficult to round out a memoir, to connect the pieces so that the life appears whole on the page, but Townshend's account of his early experiences and his musings about them help to bring this memoir full circle as they surface throughout the book. This is not to say that Townshend presents himself as someone who has it all figured out – not at all. This is the emotional pull of the narrative: he transports you within his head to his doubts, fears, creative processes, and his very strong romantic streak.

Townshend left rock and roll for a while (actually he tried to leave The Who any number of times) to work as an editor at Faber & Faber, where he mingled with many of the literati and held his own in conversation and through his editing work. Quite apparent in this memoir, and in a lovely way, is a mixture of strong intellect, sensitivity and high flown ideas along with a gentle self-mockery. As you read the last word, you will find yourself cheering what appears to be, at sixty-seven, Townshend’s long-sought achievement of artistic and emotional fulfillment – he knows who he is.

Jhumpa Lahiri has achieved literary success and even an adaptation from page-to screen for her novel, The Namesake. Still, it's worth noting that it all started with this 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning book of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. The nine stories in this volume are remarkable in the way they capture character, create tension, and reveal, in seven of the nine, the immigrant experience in America, even though the characters themselves may not be first generation immigrants, but rather members of the 1.5 generation.

Steeped in Indian, specifically Bengali, culture despite having been born in the U.S., Shoba and Shukumar, the primary characters in A Temporary Matter, are a married couple living apart in the same house until the lights go out. The electric company's enforced nightly power outage brings these characters together in the dark to reveal secrets. No need for a spoiler alert if you know this much, but be assured that by the end of the story you will have that moment where you judge one character and then the other and then have to find a middle ground as we do in our own lives.

Every story, except for the two set in India, presents the reader with sets of binaries, cultural or social contrasts that may or may not get resolved on the page but always continue to resonate in the reader's mind. In Sexy, we see the obliviousness of a young woman who is living in the midst of the same dicey circumstances that a co-worker describes daily, though she has no clue until the very end that she may be culpable. In Mr. Prizada Comes to Dine, Lahiri takes to task America's deliberate closed-mindedness about other cultures and in This Blessed House we see the conflict between free-spiritedness and deliberateness, the literature lover and the engineer, as played out against the background of a new marriage.

The title story, Interpreter of Maladies, investigates the two cultures side by side as American-born Indians return as tourists to India with their offspring. The lack of connection between the two cultures is apparent through the eyes of their tour guide, or interpreter, as is the romanticizing of "the other" on both sides.

Throughout the volume, the language is evocative and lovely, with vivid characterizations emerging through both action and dialogue. But it is in the final story, The Third and Final Continent, written in the first-person voice of a onetime Bengali bachelor who has traversed the world from India to London to Cambridge, Massachusetts, that we see the ineffably moving journey of evolving from immigrant to inhabitant. In fact, every story in this slim volume is guaranteed to resonate for long after you've turned the last page.

With this latest novel, Simon Mawer has made a very classy entry into the realm of spy thrillers. In the past, he has created a glorious fictional history for an actual Bauhaus masterpiece of a house in The Glass Room and has detailed the highs and pitfalls of climbing in The Fall, so it’s no secret to his readers that he has the writing chops to create vivid character and scene. But in Trapeze, there is a different kind of breathlessness, the kind we look for in a quickly moving good read.

Marian Sutro, a bilingual young woman of mixed British/French parentage, is primed for adventure from the very first pages of Trapeze (which was perhaps more aptly titled The Girl Who Fell from the Sky in Britain). Over the course of the novel she is recruited by the Inter-Services Research Bureau and assumes a variety of names and identities in service of a noble goal — helping the French resistance defeat the Germans. World War II demands a kind of bravery that Marian would have never needed in her quotidian life and she lives up to the challenge as we inevitably cheer her on. But we only know what she knows and both the reader and character are in for some surprises.

We follow her through training in Scotland to her posting in the French countryside and then in Paris. Needless to say, not everyone in these dangerous times is happy about having to rely on a young woman, and indeed her youth can be misleading. She gets the job done, and in the end is not quite sure whether she’s been used by her superiors to make something happen because of her previous emotional connections. But no matter, because Marian is a feisty heroine mostly focused on the task at hand.  But, of course, there are men, both new ones and one in particular from her past, who tend to complicate matters.

It’s hard to resist favorable comparisons with Alan Furst, whose moody novels are also great fun to read (and I highly recommend his newest, Mission to Paris). The very good thing for those of us who delight in this genre is that Mawer brings a deft hand and clever mind to his own take on the World War II espionage tale. Is Marian Sutro a character we may see in another installment? Perhaps — and I, for one, would be happy to spend more time with her.

The creature comforts of visiting Edith Wharton’s nineteenth-century New York’s upper classes in The Age of Innocence are indeed divine -- so much so that it is possible to ignore all of those people, the maids, cooks and drivers that make it so. But class consciousness is not Wharton’s main agenda. That is more the foibles of the upper crust and their lust for perfect appearance over messier reality.

The undeniable fact is that this novel is as current today as when Wharton wrote it in 1920 as an exposé of the hypocritical society in which she was raised.

When we first meet Newland Archer at the opera on a chilly January evening in the 1870s, he is a type: the satisfied, vain, and somewhat arrogant, wealthy, and well-born man about town. Yet, though his life is molded by convention, there is an independent streak about him. He may be about to be engaged in the most proper way to May Welland, a girl he envisions fashioning into the woman he would like (in his own small Pygmalion fantasy), but at the same time he voices the idea that women ought to be as free as men. Of course, he doesn't see this as a possibility for his future wife, only for her cousin, the Countess Olenska. And here the complications begin.

Ellen Olenska is intoxicating. She questions why society is the way it is and flaunts convention at every turn, not necessarily in defiance, but as naturally as she might tap Newland's knee during a conversation. In other words, she breaks the very rules that Newland was brought up to obey, and his heart quickens.

Wharton is wielding an incisive pen here, for this is not just a romantic tale but one which skewers social mores as it builds a variety of narrative tensions. While this society is dancing a precisely choreographed minuet and no one who is anyone uses the wrong fork, we see the churning beneath the behavior of what Wharton terms the "hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought." Indeed, there are many "real" things going on, and the author deftly guides you to comprehend this reality in some of the most glorious prose ever written.

Head versus heart, duty versus passion, money versus values, the very issues we face in the twenty-first century are skillfully and artfully depicted here. And at the very end, which leaps ahead twenty-six years to almost the turn of the twentieth century (and I will not ruin it for you), modern readers will argue fiercely about whether Newland Archer made the "right" decisions.

Colum McCann has a remarkable ability to layer compelling narratives to create a wide variety of imaginative worlds, often rooted in reality. Captivated by Let the Great World Spin (2009), I went back to his earlier novel Zoli (2006) to find myself immediately immersed in the world of the Roma in Eastern Europe and in the life of a poet loosely modeled on Papusza, a twentieth-century Polish Gypsy poet. Although McCann's work may spring from the real, his leaps are prodigious and he creates characters that make the world a more vibrant place.

The narrative arc of the novel is as intriguing as it is effective. Moving among first and third person points of view and between the 1930s and 2003, McCann traces the romantic, familial, and political history of Zoli, a Roma poet and one of the fiercest women you will ever encounter. From her earliest conversations with her grandfather to the later conversations with her daughter, Zoli exhibits a stunning strength of character and will for self-determination.

But this is not hagiography and Zoli is flawed as well. Not as flawed as the society around her and the way it treats people who are considered "other," for this is also a tale of the Roma people, or Gypsies, who have been spurned and shunned throughout their existence.

From the first glimpse of the very closed and self-protective Roma society seen through the eyes of a journalist, to life inside a Roma settlement, to the larger politics of Czechoslovakia, McCann develops a picture of a time that is specific and yet still very relevant to our lives. This is not a treatise on what it means to be an outsider, which Zoli is and becomes more so over the course of the novel, but in its depiction of the talented and heartbroken woman at its core, it elicits our empathy as it tests our varying notions of heroism and loyalty.

Moreover, the novel has a lot to say about the modern world versus the natural world and about the value and meaning of various art forms. The language is sensuous and the characters so fully and completely developed that each voice is unique and distinct. McCann takes on an enormous canvas and manages, like the great artist he is, to make the particulars so emphatic and moving that the whole picture, once opaque, becomes crystalline at the end.

I can hardly wait for 2013, which will bring his new novel, Transatlantic, to my eager eyes.

Published in 1890, The Picture of Dorian Gray seems particularly apt reading for people who survived the last decades of the twentieth century and the first one of the twenty-first. That could be because Oscar Wilde lived through the nineteenth century's "fin de siècle" excess or because Wilde was always ahead of his time -- and frequently pilloried for that. To many of Wilde's contemporary readers, this novel was considered scandalous.

We're a bit more tolerant these days, and innuendos of homosexual attachment are less than shocking, but the aesthetic and sensual excess in these pages is still remarkable.

It's a deceptively simple tale -- a young man, Dorian Gray, has his portrait painted by Basil Hallward and the result is a remarkable likeness and work of art. Gray's face is his fame and he makes a wish that it should always remain the same as it is in the portrait. Given the fact that the novel's central conceit is the most well-known part of it, I'm not spilling any secrets by revealing that, yes, Dorian remains as he is portrayed in the painting while the portrait grows older and more hideous with Dorian's every vile action.

To say that Dorian Gray is an exemplar of self-indulgence, vanity, and sensual greed is too simple, for the novel resonates in more complex ways. Large questions of good and evil and human agency come to mind, and I almost felt as though I was being challenged to find the perfect gift for the man who has everything but a soul to call his own. Echoes of Faust are here, indeed, as are foreshadowings of our own adoration of people with too much money, augmented youth, and too much time on their hands. Do we sell ourselves to portray unblemished beauty to the world and believe that we can conceal wrongdoing with pretty things? Can great beauty conceal evil? I leave you to answer that.

Wilde is a master of style and wit, sometimes to the novel's detriment but always to the reader's delight. He may owe some of the more florid sensuality to the work of Huysmans' novel A Rebours, a debt he acknowledged, but the telling of the tale is all Wilde.

The Picture of Dorian Gray offers morality lessons but without preachiness. Dorian's downward spiral and last-minute attempts to resurrect his innocent youth are riveting, and no matter how evil his actions, he seems less to blame than his great admirer and corrupter, Lord Henry Wotton. Now there's a sly villain befitting a Gothic novel!

The geography of New York City is the same but the ambiance is oh so very 1930s in the pages of Amor Towles' novel, Rules of Civility. And what a world it is — filled with innocence aching for the thrills that money can buy, as young women are courted by well-born men. Yet as the novel unfolds we find deceit, passion, intrigue, and everything that makes a novel a delectable and satisfying read. Moreover, there is undeniable — but never prissy — moral depth to the issues the novel raises.

A whirl of uptown venues — the 21 Club, the Beresford, the Carlyle, the King Cole Bar, the Rainbow Room – conjure opulence and money, even today. But the novel deliberately juxtaposes these iconic haunts with ordinary images that open each of its sections — subway photos by Walker Evans that speak to the quotidian lives the majority of New Yorkers lived in the late '30s.

Katey Kontent, born Katya, is from the wrong side of the tracks, Queens, but that doesn't get in her way because she is not only very smart, but wise beyond her years. Her voice opens the novel in 1969 but we quickly find ourselves in 1938 when Katey, young and feisty, is employed as a typist at a law firm and lives in a boardinghouse with others, who may not all be fortunate enough to discard the social shackles of their birth.

Katey is that rarest of self-aware heroines for she is both kind and competitive, generous but aware of generosity's cost. The novel first embroils us in the midst of her new affection for Tinker Grey and her friendship with Eve Ross. But this is no mere love triangle that Towles creates; it is a portrait of an era, where young swells and wannabe swells take their girls to Marx Brothers movies, fortifying their laughter with sterling silver flasks. It's also a time when a young woman can rise from the typing pool to editing at Gotham magazine, "a sort of Vogue of the mind," not by knowing the right people but by being clever and creative. Throw in old family camps in the Adirondacks and parties at estates on the Long Island Sound where people swan around in gowns and tuxedos and the glamour quotient is pretty high. But there are also the seedy bars, the downtown artists, the Spanish Civil War, and the girls who won't make it out of the typing pool. It's not a spoiler to say that very few people are who they pretend to be.

Towles manages to delineate all aspects of the society and the engaging voice of Katey Kontent with grace, remarkable descriptive skill, and more than a few killer lines. This is a first novel that offers a world you will be happy to live in and sad to leave when you turn that last page.

If there’s one thing I know about reading Nathan Englander’s stories, it’s that even if I think I know where the tale is going, it’s probably not going to go there. But I am going to be surprised, delighted, and often in some very real -- and very exhilarating -- way challenged. My assumptions, my values, my concepts of what story and character are might be up for grabs. His first collection of short stories, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, taught me that, and this new collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, has reconfirmed it.

The title story – of course it’s a riff on Raymond Carver’s iconic story "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" – is perfection. It has everything:  finely limned characters, reunion after many years, religious and cultural argument, revelations of the unknown in the known (what literature teachers call epiphanies) and an ending that forces you to consider your own commitments and definitions of love. There may even be some blasphemy here, but that depends on the reader’s tolerance for using Anne Frank’s name in vain.  Mine is pretty high.

Jewish life and the Holocaust loom in every one of these stories, but in very different ways. "Sister Hills" relates the bitter and heart-wrenching unfolding of a promise in the Promised Land over a span of thirty-eight years. "Free Fruit for Widows" is a coming-of-age tale filled with bittersweet moments and oddly effective morality lessons that are counter to any code of ethics taught in Sunday schools. In "Camp Sundown," every moment of hilarity is matched by a catch in the throat. Englander manages to make vivid and monstrous characters out of seeming stereotypes, geriatric Jewish campers who know what they know and can’t be dissuaded even by the rational, young, beset-upon camp director. Every boy’s fantasy life provides the fodder for "Peep Show," which parodies Jewish guilt as though Franz Kafka and Woody Allen had invaded Englander’s dream life.

But Englander always shakes the reader out of even the complacency that comes with satisfaction. It’s not enough to have the rabbi scolding the peep show goer, he himself must engage in an even greater taboo, which turns him into an object of lust so that he can experience his objectification from the other side. The desire to punish someone for as righteous a reason as anti-Semitism in “How We Avenged the Blums” turns into a quandary about acquired and exercised power. And, of course, the Anne Frank game in the title story is by no means a game. Always unsettling, Nathan Englander never takes the easy way out – and that may be why he’s such a pleasure to read.