"After eight years, I was due for another collection of non-fictional prose," John Updike explains in the preface of his new compilation, Due Considerations. "I had hoped that, thanks to the dwindling powers of old age, the bulk would be significantly smaller than that of my two previous assemblages." At the final tally, however, Updike discovered that there "was less, but not significantly less. There was no escaping the accumulated [...]

If werewolves really do exist nowadays, then they are much more likely to appear on the crowded streets of Los Angeles than on a foggy Yorkshire moor. As anyone who has found himself adrift in night-time LA can attest, the feral demeanour of its inhabitants as they prowl Sunset or Ventura Boulevard more closely suggests the dark imaginings of the Brothers Grimm than the sunny world of The OC. And [...]

The meaning of the word "disappear" has undergone an unhappy evolution in the past few de-cades. There was a time, not too long ago, when people and things would simply disappear. Now, however, individuals can also be disappeared, usually by a malevolent government that wants to cover its culpability. Once this happens, the word takes on an even more horrifying noun form, as those who vanish become The Disappeared.

One of the best things about Anthony Swofford's celebrated memoir Jarhead was its depiction of what it was like to take part in a war that often did not really feel like a war. His first novel is a sort of companion piece, showing what it is like to grow up in a peacetime that is not at all peaceful.

Exit A opens in 1989, as the Berlin Wall is [...]

While many novelists permit readers a deeper awareness of their characters' predicaments than the characters possess themselves, Claire Messud pushes this prescience to the limit in her fine new novel. Set in the six months leading up to September 2001, The Emperor's Children skilfully depicts a large cast of entitled, self-absorbed New Yorkers as they conduct breathless romances, extramarital affairs, literary squabbles and career schemes - never suspecting that 19 [...]

During a recent car journey through Massachusetts, I took my family for a reluctant lunch at a franchise of a restaurant chain called Friendly's. While awaiting our meal, one of my kids pointed out the bizarre artwork on the walls, a series of photos of traditional New England landmarks with examples of the restaurant's food Photoshopped in. A car-sized cheeseburger emerged from a covered bridge, a huge scoop of ice [...]

Combining a radical critique of neoclassical economics with a story of marital strife might not seem a promising recipe for a first novel. It is a measure of Thomas Legendre's skill that he manages to make this strange hybrid work in The Burning, a novel that mixes a spirited challenge to our faith in economic growth with a full-blooded tale of infidelity and romantic redemption.

The story opens in Las [...]

On 8 November 1864, General Wil-liam Tecumseh Sherman issued a special field order to the large Union army he had assembled in recently conquered Atlanta, informing his men that they were about to embark on a campaign that would for ever change the face of warfare. The goal, he claimed, was "to strike a blow at our enemy that will have a material effect in producing what we all so [...]

A child who lives through a messy divorce will not necessarily be scarred, but Sean Wilsey's chances of escaping without emotional injury were always low. When his socialite parents split up in the early 1980s, it was deemed the most sensational divorce in San Francisco history, leading one tabloid to call Wilsey's mother "The World's Most Expensive Wife", after she requested $30,000 a year for clothes alone. It was, Wilsey [...]

John Updike just might be the sexual revolution's most meticulous chronicler. With novels such as Rabbit, Run, Marry Me and Couples, he provided graphic, as-it-happened portraits of the unzipped era between the introduction of the Pill and the advent of Aids. At a time when sex was seen as a liberating adventure, Updike plunged fearlessly into the carnal wilderness, detailing every grope and mapping every genital with unblinking exactitude.

Villages, [...]