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Nuance is rare on the bestseller list. In most cases, ambiguity is stripped away to appeal to the greatest number and lowest common denominator. So it always renews my faith when a popular novelist shows a decided preference for moral complexity. It suggests that readers crave more than simplistic escape. Or perhaps it just means that some writers, like Khaled Hosseini, know how to whisk rough moral fiber into something exquisite. Read full article >>    

When this tale of obsessive love was originally published in English in 1981, Graham Greene called it “the best novel of the year.” The author, Benjamin Tammuz, lived in Israel, where he was a sculptor, diplomat and literary editor of the Ha’aretz newspaper before his death in 1989. Now, Europa Editions, the intrepid independent publishing house that has brought us terrific literary fiction from Europe and, more recently, high-end mystery and noir, has reprinted Tammuz’s novel. Read full article >>    

You think a relationship is complicated when a woman is from Venus and a man is from Mars? Trust me, that’s a piece of cake compared with the hurdles that a modest golem and a mercurial jinni face when they fall in love. After all, a golem is a monster made of clay — the cool earth — and a jinni is a creature born of fire. And in Helene Wecker’s charming, albeit way too long, first novel, “The Golem and the Jinni,” their relationship is tested by a megalomaniacal Bedouin wizard, the golem’s evil creator, and all the enticements that Manhattan can offer a couple of curious immigrants at the turn of the 20th century. Read full article >>    

What do writers owe the past, and, more specifically, what do they owe their ancestors’ victims? As a white woman born and raised in Birmingham, Ala., Margaret Wrinkle faced those challenging questions. A distant ancestor of hers had practiced slave breeding. Now she has responded to that peculiar historical fact with an original and profound novel called “Wash.” The medium of fiction allows her to bypass the sensational and delve into the realm of testimony and truth. Read full article >>    

Over the past 20 years, Steven Nadler, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has established himself as this country’s leading authority on the philosophical thought of 17th-century Europe. He has written a major biography of Spinoza, edited scholarly works about Malebranche, been a Pulitzer finalist for “Rembrandt’s Jews,” and taken up, in “The Best of all Possible Worlds,” the arguments of Leibniz and his contemporaries about that most troubling of all theological questions: the problem of evil. Why does God allow the innocent to suffer? Read full article >>