David Mitchell is both a novelist and a literary saboteur. The author of five novels, including the forthcoming The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, the British born Mitchell has been hailed as a genius, awarded numerous literary honors, and short-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize twice.

Yet, flowing beneath this popular praise has been a heady undercurrent of critical discontent. Those suspicious of Mitchell’s work accuse him of being a magician, a ventriloquist, a literary trickster. In Cloud Atlas, Mitchell ranged through a wide spectrum of authorial voices, echoing writers as diffuse as John Grisham, Ursula LeGuin, and Haruki Murakami, and many critics saw a writer extremely adept at aping other writers’, but one without the ability to write as himself. Tom Bissell, writing in the New York Times, suggested that because of Mitchell’s knack for dramatic shifts in narrative voice, that “Cloud Atlas is the sort of book that makes ambition seem slightly suspect.”

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Well, is she? It may seem unfair to ask a 28-year-old writer to carry the entire burden of Gen Y on her shoulders, but that’s how her publisher is selling ex-Gawker editor Emily Gould’s first book, the personal essay collection And the Heart Says Whatever, so we don’t feel bad holding her to it. Still, it’s a harder question to ask than to answer.

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There was a time when homosexuality, drug use, infidelity, and a Communist past were considered scandalous. In Eisenhower’s America any one of the above was enough to get your face pasted in the pages of a tabloid tell-all called Confidential. And if you weren’t careful, the coverage could ruin your career. In a media culture dominated by the likes of TMZ and Gawker, those sorts of “indiscretions” can still seem to be quite scandalous. And, with the exception of perhaps homosexuality, all are potential career wreckers. But Confidential was there first, and they were there when things were most titillating.

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Books spotlighted by publishers as their key titles come with balls of hype trailing behind them. But it seems like we’ve been hearing about David Shields’ barely-200-page treatise Reality Hunger for ages, and it was only released this past Tuesday.

Maybe it’s because Zadie Smith used the book as a crutch for insecure introspection about her own writing. Maybe it’s because it’s already become required reading in university spheres, galleys passed from one student to the next like an illicit hit of crack cocaine. I know I’ve already had spirited discussions about Reality Hunger with friends and critical colleagues. It’s hard to resist the urge to argue with the text, especially when Shields states his intention “to write the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated (but unconnected) artists in a multitude of forms and media…who are breaking larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’ into their work” right there on page one.

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Like Chatroulette, Union Atlantic, Adam Haslett’s new novel, boasts the inevitability of a work mainlined to the zeitgeist. It seems to have been plucked fully formed from the ether; or if not from there, then at least from the airwaves of Fox News. Doug Fanning, the book’s whorl of selfishness, need, and greed, is today’s Gordon Gekko — a VP at Union Atlantic, a bank too big to fail that’s terrifyingly plausible. Haslett, whose first book of short stories, You Are Not a Stranger Here, was nominated for both the Pulitzer and the Man Booker Prize, isn’t so much interested in detailing the gold of this man’s crowns as he is in the crumbling of the soul behind his smile.

While in the Navy, Fanning read green blips on a radar screen in the Gulf War, clusters of pixels the coordinates of which, if properly interpreted, meant death for the ship, threat, plane, or people they represented. In civilian life, Fanning makes a killing reading similarly abstract numbers on a screen that mean, somewhere, dollars, yen, billions, profit, or loss. Read More »

We move too fast. It’s a common complaint among just about everyone these days, as they usually have their eyes glued to a high-speed computer or their ears anchored to a cell phone. And it’s the kind of common problem to which there seems to be no solution. Stopping to smell the roses isn’t even an issue; most of the time we don’t even know where the roses grow. Leave it to Don DeLillo to hush us up for a moment.

DeLillo, a man who doesn’t do email and once famously carried a business card that said “I don’t want to talk about it,” has never really been one for the fast track. And it makes perfect sense that he returns with a quiet and stirring rumination on time and death and the meaninglessness of words. The book is called Point Omega, and it just might remake your day.

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If you are not a gadget, what are you? Jaron Lanier would have you be a person, but he warns that Web 2.0 is pushing us away from personhood in ways that we haven’t really examined. Actually, he might have you be a cephalopod, because he finds octopi mesmerizing, but that enthusiasm only appears at the end of You Are Not a Gadget, his first book.

It is something of a reckoning. Lanier turns a philosopher’s eye to our everyday online tools. What do they say about us? How have they come to inhabit and inhibit the way we imagine ourselves? Who do our new systems reward? Is the Internet all that, really?

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It’s not easy to explain the evolution of humans. The fossil record is limited, and ecological transformations have erased a lot of evidence. The prevailing theory among evolutionary biologists is known as “Man-the-Hunter.” It suggests that eating animals challenged humans to overpower and outsmart competitor species, travel long distances, and cooperate, which turned our great-ape ancestors into the lousy climbers with big brains that we are today. According to Harvard Professor Richard Wrangham, this isn’t the whole story. In his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, he explains the “cooking hypothesis,” which contends that cooking is responsible for our large brains, our small mouths and guts, our division of labor, and our hairlessness. Read More »

Two films open this week in New York that divide the Paris of our dreams from the Paris of the real. Cedric Klapisch’s Paris is a tourist board-approved attempt to capture the city and its characters by way of Art Nouveau facades and exaggerated lives. It stars Juliette Binoche. Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum is set in the outskirts of the city and inhabited by characters whose resumes are intentionally hidden. Both have their rewards, but one is candy, while the other is a new cuisine that tastes odd at first, but soon creates a craving. Read More »

Following the career of late Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño has become almost a full-time endeavor for the Anglophone literary world. Two of his greatest novels, 2666 and The Savage Detectives, were published in just the last two years, and the schedule his publishers have for the remaining volumes — including the unfinished coda for 2666 — will last well into 2011. The Skating Rink, the author’s first novel, and the latest to be published in English, is a fantastic, hazy tale of murder and paranoia in the fictional Spanish seaside town of Z. Read More »