The foundation for those books was laid in Vietnam itself, where he began writing his first book, “If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home,” a memoir, in the last hour or two of daylight, from the foxhole he had dug to keep himself alive, a story he recounts in an interview bundled with the newly released 40th anniversary audiobook edition of the memoir. By the end of his tour, he had accumulated, by his count, 30 or 40 handwritten pages, which represented the beginning of a lifelong reckoning with what O’Brien now calls “that terrible decision”: “What do you do when you get a draft notice and you think a war is wrong? And I struggled with that for months prior to my being inducted into the army, and I’m still struggling with it, 40 years later.”

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Previously, the only audiobook versions of most of Waugh's celebrated novels -- from "Vile Bodies" to the colonial parody "Set Out More Flags" -- were so severely abridged that they made no sense at all. (An exception was Jeremy Irons' recording of Waugh's most popular book, "Brideshead Revisited.") This was ridiculous; the new unabridged audiobook version of "Scoop" -- just released with 12 other Waugh titles to coincide with handsome new print editions from Little, Brown -- is less than seven hours long, substantially shorter than most other audio titles. There's not a lot of fat in Waugh's fiction, and cutting any of it is a crime against the reader.

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The novel, which until this point has been flatlining through page after page of perfunctory-seeming scenes of Susan being angry at herself for not mourning her late husband enough, suddenly perks up as the reader thinks: What a great place to set a novel. Then, for another hundred pages or so, it becomes clear that this weird old house full of dead animals isn’t so much the setting for Millet’s novel as a distressingly accurate metaphor for the experience of reading it.

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Felix Gilman's two vaguely steampunkish novels, "The Half-Made World" and the just-published "The Rise of Ransom City," come closer than many previous efforts to nailing America's conflicted collective unconscious. The setting is not, of course, called America (any more than Middle-earth is called England). Nevertheless, it's instantly recognizable as a version of the Wild West, a frontier land with towns named Clementine, Gibson or Jasper City, sandwiched between the distant, civilized East and, to the West, a region known only as the Rim. Way out West, as Harry Ransom, the narrator of "The Rise of Ransom City," explains it, are "territories where the future was still open, where laws were still unsettled -- I mean not least what they call the laws of nature, which as everyone knows are different on the Rim."

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Gottlieb's storied career as editor in chief of Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf, as well as a five-year stint as editor in chief of the New Yorker, has provided him with plenty of firsthand experience in the foibles of literary greats. (He discovered and edited Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" and has edited the work of such authors as John Cheever, Toni Morrison, John le Carré, Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Caro, Barbara Tuchman and Bill Clinton.) Late in life, he launched a second career as a writer, contributing long critical essays to the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker, as well as penning biographies of Sarah Bernhardt and George Balanchine. Deciding that the lives of the Dickens children merited further investigation, he followed his usual method of absorbing all available writings on the topic. An irresistibly readable new book, "Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens," is the result.

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That’s what they tell you, right?

By they, of course, I mean the majority of professors in MFA programs in Writing the country over–MFA programs, it might be said, that have propagated in recent years like churches of a new religion, departments filled with spectacled prophets at the pulpit, elating the instantly talented, while leaving the unlucky, or underdeveloped, to recoil from the successes of their peers.

Brooding around classroom tables, graduate writing students are set up to test their might. Their mentors, published authors of various degrees of repute, discuss prose and structure, poetics and politics, honesty and art. Character, however, they tell you–especially in fiction–is the key to a good story. And they tell you this essentially because they are correct. There are many things that novelists have to learn in order to actually turn their scribbles into marketable merchandise, and those things don’t necessarily need to be learned by dishing out the equivalent of a down-payment on a home. But if I walked away with anything from my MFA, it is that character is what makes a book readable. For someone, anyone, to pay tens of dollars to read what someone other than them has decided is worthwhile, they should be able to do so knowing that the imaginary people they’ll be spending the next 20 hours of their life with are at least a little complex (unless superficial husks are your shtick).

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Philip Roth saw it coming in 2010, when he expressed concern that the “multiple screens” vying against the novel were causing its decline: “The concentration, the focus, the solitude, the silence, all the things that are required for serious reading are not within people's reach anymore.” So did Michiko Kakutani, who wrote at length about the subject in her seminal essay “Texts Without Contexts,” that same year, exploring how “most emailed” lists and social media shares were causing writers to pander to audiences. Kakutani posed the question, “Are literary-minded novelists increasingly taking into account what their readers want or expect?”

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The action mostly takes place stateside, with the title character and his fellow members of the so-called "Bravo squad" making a victory lap through several U.S. cities sometime in the mid-2000s. The soldiers have executed a heroic action in the vicinity of Fox News cameras, and they've been embraced as "real-life American heroes" by the nation. It's Thanksgiving by the time their tour delivers them to a football game in Dallas, the throbbing epicenter of red-blooded, know-nothing, gimcrack patriotism, and 19-year-old Billy has already learned to zone out when people start shaking his hand and talking about "our freedoms." Like the rest of the Bravos, he just wants to meet a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, or better yet, Destiny's Child, who will also be performing on the field at halftime.

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In Cronin's dystopian hellscape, "virals" harry the few remaining pockets of humanity in the continental U.S. The infected feed on blood and exhibit a certain animal cunning, but have no memory of their former lives. Each serves as a drone-like follower to one of 12 original vampires, test subjects in a military experiment gone very, very wrong. A couple of generations after these creatures have laid waste to the country, the more intrepid characters from the last half of "The Passage" continue their quest to kill the 12, thereby liberating their hives into true death.

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In my new novel, "Goldberg Variations," I have four narrators. One, Gloria Goldberg Garrison, is a real stinker. Not evil, mind you, but cruel to amuse herself and others. She’s the sort who seeks out your most sensitive area so she can know precisely where to stick in the shiv. Gloria made me uncomfortable enough that during the writing I had to soothe myself by thinking: Hey, Dostoevsky probably didn't think Raskolnikov was a sweetheart.

What do these bad guys offer us?  A chance to pray for their redemption? A safe way to relish sin? I’ve liked or loved so many novels that had main characters who either made morally questionable choices or were downright evil. The entire noir genre is theirs.

Still, beyond the Chandlers and the Hammetts, here are my “Naughty Nine,” first-rate novels that feature a gamut of no-goodniks.

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The main character is Emil Larsson, a self-described man of "the Town," as the people in the book invariably refer to Stockholm. A hustler who has clambered his way into the ideal civil service job (he's a sort of undercover customs agent whose work consists of hanging out in taverns and coffee shops hunting smugglers), Emil believes it is in his interest "professionally and personally to be utterly forgettable — escaping entanglements, obligations and occasionally revenge." He has one friend, Mrs. Sparrow, an older woman who runs an exclusive gaming establishment and with whom he often serves as a partner in the popular game known as Boston whist.

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Nonfiction finalists include New Yorker staff writer Katherine Boo's journey in an Indian slum (“Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity"), tireless biographer and journalist Robert A. Caro, for his fourth book on Lyndon B. Johnson (“The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson") and a posthumous nomination for New York Times foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid (“House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East"), who died earlier this year while on assignment in Syria.

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Libba Bray's new YA novel, "The Diviners," is one whopping exception, a sprawling tale told in the third person from multiple points of view. The print version clocks in at 600 pages and change, and January LaVoy's narration will gobble up 18 hours of your life. You won't miss them. "The Diviners," a supernatural thriller set in Jazz Age New York, hurtles along with a saucy brio that successfully marries contemporary teenage sensibilities with a brash, youth-mad moment in American history. It's tremendous fun, and LaVoy's performance is dazzling.

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Let’s start where the book starts, with the most basic question of all: what is art? This is actually the hardest one to answer without the full text in front of us, but the website does provide some clues: Rand sees the primary purpose of art as “nonutilitarian and psychological in nature” and says that its cognitive function is “to bring man’s fundamental concepts and values ‘to the perceptual level of his consciousness’ and allow him ‘to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts.’” OK, fair enough. I can get with that.

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All of which is to explain why this week's Listener singles out not a brand-new release but one from earlier this year: Edoardo Ballerini's narration of Jess Walter's "Beautiful Ruins." Walter narrated his last novel, "The Financial Lives of the Poets," himself, and splendidly, but you can see why a pro was called in this time around. "Financial Lives" was the first-person account of one man's flame-out in the recent economic crisis, a compact novel strongly tinted by the main character's acidic gloom. "Beautiful Ruins" ranges wider in time and space, beginning in Italy in 1962 and hopping back and forth from a tiny coastal town there to modern-day Los Angeles and the Midwest.

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