Julio Cortázar has left even bolder suggestions for readers of his experimental novel Hopscotch, published 50 years ago today, June 28. He invites them to start the novel at chapter 73 and then proceed through the novel’s 155 sections in a prescribed order — Cortázar gives a list of the alternative sequence in his “Table of Instructions” — leaping back and forth in the book, until they finally finish, having already read 132 through 155, with chapter 131. To make matters more interesting, he asks readers to skip chapter 55 completely (I will admit I cheated and read it anyway), and to read one of the chapters twice.

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Two outsiders to the world of Shakespeare criticism have penned “Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine,” a slim volume on that well-known dark prince of Danes. Laura Miller deems it as "such a treat:"

The authors — a philosophy professor and a psychoanalyst who are married to each other — claim no special expertise and argue no ironclad theory. They investigate, speculate and propose. “We are outsiders to the world of Shakespeare criticism,” they write, and the thinkers they have chosen to respond to (Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Hegel, Freud, Jacques Lacan and Nietzsche) are (arguably) peripheral to the field as well. The result is a slim volume on “Hamlet” that this reader found more invigorating than many a more rigorous work. All you need to engage with it is a modest acquaintance with the play and an open mind. Each of the short chapters in “Stay, Illusion!” is a springy diving board poised over a deep pool of thought. Find one you like the looks of, bounce a bit, then plunge in.

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But his words were poetry made prose, with that talent for adding just enough of the alien to render the familiar world magnificent and awe-inspiring. His science fiction tiptoed just on the edge of the world we lived in every day, making it crackle with a connection to reality that was beyond the grasp of many of his more famous contemporaries who wrote so much further beyond the ken of the mundane. Stephen King has said that Matheson was the single largest influence on his writing.

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Without summarizing the plot in any way, what would you say your novel is about?

Sarah Bruni: The Midwest. Spider-Man. Identity-borrowing. Adolescence.  Fugitives falling in love. Formative acts of reading.

Alissa Nutting: Sex. Obsession. Monstrosity. Gender roles.

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Fifty years ago, it was still possible to believe that drugs could free our minds and transform the world; the chemical evangelist had not yet become a figure of total ridicule. The spirit of Rimbaud, with his systematic derangement of the senses for transforming poets into seers, could be felt among the Beats; the psychologist Timothy Leary, drawing on his Harvard Psilocybin Project experiments of 1960–62, hymned the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics; and in 1964, with all these precedents as inspiration, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters embarked on the psychedelic cross-country bus trip that would be immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Just a few years earlier, Kesey had eviscerated America's conformist culture in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but now he claimed that fiction writing was an old-fashioned and artificial form. The promise of a different world lay in the trip itself:

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Neil Gaiman's novels are covers between which mythical creatures and beleaguered protagonists live and interact amid supernatural plots often dealing with youth and struggle. The fairy tale-esque character of his modern adult fantasies lightly masks "the intelligible message that can be derived from it," writes Laura Miller.

Gaiman’s first novel for adults in eight years, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane,” would seem to follow this pattern; most of the action, recounted in the first person, describes the experiences of a nameless 7-year-old boy. But “The Ocean at the End of the Lane” does feel different, and not only because of its framing device. The novel begins and ends with the narrator, now an adult, returning to the English village where he grew up, for a family funeral. (The deceased is never identified, but there are hints it is the man’s father.) We learn that he’s been married and separated, that he is a working artist, that he has grown children. When he looks back on the strange events of his childhood, it is through the mellowed and slightly melancholy lens of middle-age. What the story sacrifices of the sweet, glassy purity of a child’s view, it compensates for with the complex sepia of maturity; it’s the difference between a bright young white wine and a well-aged burgundy.

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A sequel that definitely won't happen, however? "It": "There will be no 'It' sequel; I don't think I could bear to deal with Pennywise again. Too scary, even for me," wrote King.

King fans may be further disappointed that King also has no plans to give recurring character Randall Flagg, who has appeared in "The Stand," "The Eye of the Dragon" and "The Dark Tower" series, among other novels, his own, full life story. "Giving Flagg his own story would make him too coherent, somehow. He's the guy behind the scenes, pulling all the strings."

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For almost two decades, Colum McCann has labored at a very old truth indeed: that the burdens of the past condition the present. It wasn’t, however, until his fifth entry in this project, the 2009 novel Let the Great World Spin, that McCann was widely hailed as a visionary. Though the book, with its array of perspectives and its interest in the ways in which the past lives on in the present, hardly marked a radical departure from McCann’s previous four novels, it earned him universal critical acclaim, a National Book Award, and the big audience that had hitherto eluded him. Its success seemed due in no small part to its subject matter: arranging a Joycean cast of urban dwellers around Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers, Let the Great World Spin made an indelible and appealing contribution to the fledgling cohort of 9/11 novels.

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Born in Ireland and living in New York, McCann replied to a series of questions by email, discussing, among other things, the thin line between history and fiction, the bonds between Ireland and America, and his unabashed fondness for research.

¤

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Following the trail of the coquettish Lillian Leitzel, the "World’s Most Marvelous Gymnast,” and her gravity-defying partner, Alfredo Codona, "Queen of the Air" is an irresistible romantic biography of the Brad and Angelina of the Big Top, writes Laura Miller.

Jensen knows how to tell this story, with just the right degree of old-timey melodrama. Here’s how he describes an argument during the long years when Codona drove himself to perfect the Triple: His father and brother “begged him to abandon his quest for the feat before it killed him or, worse, left him such a pathetic cripple that he would be belted into a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Codona could not be persuaded.” In counterpoint, he pulls back the curtains concealing the brutality of the performer’s lot: celebrated and fawned over one year, forced by an accident to work as an auto mechanic the next. Leitzel was surrounded by admirers and showered with gifts, but before going to bed every night she injected caffeine into her shoulder socket to tame the “pulsating, and some nights, hammering pain.” Unlike even the most battered professional athletes, she performed twice a day, every day during the circus’ season, and on off-season gigs in Europe.

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1. The Crack-Up 

WHEN THE 1920S WERE OVER, Scott Fitzgerald cracked up. The world he’d helped create — The Jazz Age — had ended. By the time he died in 1940, at age 44, most of his works were out of print. He was not forgotten so much as he was willfully put out of mind.

I’ve loved Fitzgerald since I was a teenager, and over the years I’ve read nearly everything he published. The Great Gatsby has never been my favorite, although I don’t despise it. The hardness and grace of his style in Gatsby are astonishing, and there’s no question that it’s his most perfect novel, by far. My favorites, though, are his imperfect novels, the ones where his poetry and humanity show through the prose: Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and Damned, short stories like “The Freshest Boy” or “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” and the Crack-Up essays.

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Rachel Kushner has simultaneously stunned and scared male critics with her "virtuosic" new novel about a young woman named Reno navigating the 1970s New York art scene. "The Flamethrowers" is a bold contender for the Great American Novel, writes Laura Miller:

But the boldness of this novel has more to do with its voice than its subject matter; you get a heaping serving of Kushner’s virtuosity in the opening chapters, which describe Reno’s journey back west by motorcycle, as part of a nebulous art project. I could present samples of her writing here, but better yet, just see James Wood’s nearly gobstruck review of “The Flamethrowers” in the New Yorker; he is the maestro of the representative quote, after all. He does a good job of what may be an impossible task. It is fiendishly hard to nail down and demonstrate the quality that most distinguishes the work of a remarkable author — that is, her authority. Kushner has authority in spades, seemingly without reaching for it, as if she were just born that way.

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Laura Miller explains that like Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” Paul Collins’ “Duel With the Devil” offers deep insight into society through its handling of a grisly crime, offering a window into New York's political and social climate in the 1800s:

That’s how Paul Collins uses the famous real-life murder mystery at the center of “Duel With the Devil.” This sensational crime took place in Manhattan in December, 1799, on the very brink of a new century (or not quite, if you’re the sort of pedant who insists that the millennium didn’t really turn until New Year’s 1801 — and yes, those people were around back then, too!). The body of a young Quaker woman, Elma Sands, was found at the bottom of a well in Lispenard Meadows, a swath of marshy, undeveloped land that separated New York City proper from Greenwich Village, approximately where the neighborhood of Soho stands today. The guy almost everyone liked for the killer was Levi Weeks, a carpenter who lived in the same boarding house as Sands, an establishment run by Sands’ cousin, Catharine Ring, and her husband, Elias.

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The $2.99 e-book, out June 1 from eccentric New York–based art-trash publisher Badlands Unlimited and author Tréy Sager, promises danger and steamy love scenes in the Russian wilderness as Powers and Bass try to survive. Here's their first encounter:

“Who are you? What’s your name?”

“Steadman Bass,” he answered flatly, yanking the glove from his hand and thrusting his paw toward her.

They shook hands, and Danielle felt the hot vitality of his blood. His hand was surging with warmth. His fingers were weathered like a workman’s, but his touch betrayed a grace and kindness his face otherwise kept guarded. She wanted to stay fastened to him, so essential was the heat.

But she let go.

And the man walked hastily away.

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Told through the self-aware but not entirely reliable voice of Nora Eldridge, Laura Miller calls Claire Messud’s main character in “The Woman Upstairs” the counterpart to Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man:

As Nora Eldridge, the narrator of Claire Messud’s claustrophobically hypnotic new novel would have it, we are all of us surrounded by reservoirs of invisible rage. “The Woman Upstairs” purports to be the story of one of the ragers, although Nora both does and doesn’t wish to be identified with the archetypal figure in the novel’s title. The counterpart to Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, the Woman Upstairs, in Nora’s formulation, is a recessive, barely noticed neighbor, “whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a sound.” Her “day’s great excitement is the arrival of the Garnet Hill catalog.” She strives not to cause any inconvenience and is resigned to always coming second (or third) in other people’s lives.

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Laura Miller, who generally does not have “patience for the touchstones of foodie literature,” was pleasantly surprised by Michael Pollan’s “Cooked,” written from the perspective of a journalist and gardener rather than a celebrity chef:

His effort to deepen his understanding of the process of turning food into meals is the subject of his latest book, “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.” I wish I could say “Cooked” is entirely free of moments of flabby philosophizing (“Isn’t it always precisely when we are most at risk of floating away on the sea of our own inventions and conceits that we seem to row our way back to the firm shore that is nature?”), but they are rare. Admittedly, the book’s thematic structure is also a shade precious. It’s divided into four sections according to what the ancients perceived to be the four elements — fire, water, air and earth — each attributed to a different cooking method — grilling, braising and other forms of cooking in liquids, baking and fermentation. As ever, Pollan makes each of these themes the occasion for real thought as well as some energetic reporting.

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I really need your help. You're a well-read man who writes and teaches writing, and I'm a writer with a project that isn't going where I'd want it to.

I recently finished a manuscript for a novel, that I started shipping off to publishers around nine months ago. Most of the publishers shipped it right back with no explanation, but one gave me a three-page letter with a lot of helpful advice, and then this line toward the end of the letter: "We would recommend the writer to rewrite the manuscript, and send it to our YA-department."

Why don't you just hold this sword for me so I can fall on it properly? Receiving personal feedback is excellent. Everything would in fact be excellent had they just not written that last line.

Yes, many young adult novels are great. The Harry Potter books, for instance, are brilliant, and clearly work for all ages. However, I haven't written a young adult novel, and if I try to turn my manuscript into one, that means I'll have to rip out all of the subtext and symbolism, which frankly is the reason why the manuscript exists in the first place. I'm completely willing to rewrite the entire thing in a multitude of ways, but to turn it into a YA novel would mean not just removing some parts, but to castrate the entire plot.

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" 'The Recipe Box,' set to be published in July by Hyperion, tells the story of Grace D'Angelo, a single mother who returns to her hometown in Wisconsin after her best friend dies of breast cancer. The book chronicles Grace's attempt to come to terms with questions surrounding her daughter's paternity and the identity of her own father, and to fortify her relationship with her rebellious teenager. Along the way, she finds love with Mike Lund, a "muscular" teacher and volunteer firefighter with 'curly brown hair and deep gray eyes.' "

Although the source insits "it is just that—fiction," the WSJ has caught on to some uncanny similarities between the life of Grace D'Angelo and Mike Lund and that of Lee and Cuomo's. Namely:

Both Lee and D'Angelo own white cockatoos:

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