This yarn takes place in the suburbs of a giant city, and its hero is Edison Lo. There he is, in his thirties, in the middle of things! In Chicago they're coming off their night shift, in Tokyo they're asleep — that's what's happening elsewhere in the world when Edison wakes up. Our hero has had the good education, and also the good job. Together with his wife, Candy, he lives at home with his parents. In other words, the juggernaut of meaning is very much not parked heavily on Edison's lawn. But then the lurid overtakes him and the form it chooses is Park. At school and university, Park was Edison's best friend, until Park moved out east. For a decade, they never saw each other. And now, in the manner of a myth or cartoon series, Park has returned, narcotic and neurotic — just when Edison, like everyone else, has become unemployed. This reunion begins a spritely chain of events which to Ed feels like one long slide. This quick and chancy tale is full of high jinks and low tricks, complete with one orgy, one brothel and the disposal of a body, even if its heroes still try to keep up natty crosstalk and one-liners. But meanwhile something much larger might be going on. For if you start to notice minute doubles and repeats, or wonder if what you took as a literary kink might in fact be a kink of reality, well perhaps, like maybe, that shouldn't be so much of a surprise

Politics is about: a) a threesome; b) politics. Moshe loves Nana. But love can be difficult — especially if you want to be kind. And Moshe and Nana want to be kind to someone else. They want to be kind to their best friend, Anjali. Politics explores crucial problems of sexual etiquette. What should the sleeping arrangements be in a ménage-à-trois? Is it polite to read while two people have sex beside you? Is it permissible to be jealous?

An anthology of stories edited by Zadie Smith A stellar host of writers explore the cornerstone of fiction writing: character The Book of Other People is about character. Twenty-five or so outstanding writers have been asked by Zadie Smith to make up a fictional character. By any measure, creating character is at the heart of the fictional enterprise, and this book concentrates on writers who share a talent for making something recognizably human out of words (and, in the case of the graphic novelists, pictures). But the purpose of the book is variety: straight "realism"-if such a thing exists-is not the point. There are as many ways to create character as there are writers, and this anthology features a rich assortment of exceptional examples. The writers featured in The Book of Other People include: Aleksandar Hemon Nick Hornby Hari Kunzru Toby Litt David Mitchell George Saunders Colm Tóibín Chris Ware, and more

Haffner is charming, morally suspect, vain, obsessed by the libertine emperors. He is British and Jewish and a widower. But Haffner’s attachments to his nation, his race, his marriage, have always been matters of conjecture. They have always been subjects of debate. There are many stories of Haffner — but this, the most secret, is the greatest of them all. The Escape opens in a spa town snug in the unfashionable eastern Alps, where Haffner has come to claim his wife’s inheritance: a villa expropriated in darker times. After weeks of ignoring his task in order to conduct two affairs — one with a capricious young yoga instructor, the other with a hungrily passionate married woman — he discovers gradually that he wants this villa, very much. Squabbling with bureaucrats and their shadows means a fight, and Haffner wants anything he has to fight for. How can you ever escape your past, your family, your history? That is the problem of Haffner’s story in The Escape. That has always been the problem of Haffner — and his lifetime of metamorphoses and disappearances. How might Haffner ever become unattached? Through the improvised digressions of his comic couplings and uncouplings emerge the stories of Haffner’s century: the chaos of World War II, the heyday of jazz, the postwar diaspora, the uncertain triumph of capitalism, and the inescapability of memory