J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun: A Novel (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1984, 2005) ("It was not the anger of the Japanese that most disturbed Jim, but their patience." Id. at 6. "Sitting beside Basie as he polished his nails, Jim realized that the entire experience of the war had barely touched him. All the deaths and starvation were part of a confused roadside drama seen through the passenger window of the Buick, a cruel spectacle like the public stranglings in Shanghai which the British and American sailors watched during their shore leaves. He had learned nothing from the war because he expected nothing, like the Chinese peasants whom he now looted and shot. As Dr. Ransome had said, people who expected nothing were dangerous. Somehow, five million Chinese had to be taught to expect everything." Id. at 256.).
J. G. Ballard, The Kindness of Women (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991) ("For the first time I was living in the endless present that owed nothing to the past." Id. at 121. "Women were ruthless from an early age, and needed to be." Id. at 161. "Dick entered hospital for observation, passing into the paradoxical world of modern medicine, with all its professional expertise, ultra-modern technology, and complete uncertainty. As Dick pointed out ... the qualities traditionally ascribed to patients--self-delusion, a refusal to face the truth, irrational hope, and a despair born of underlying pessimism--in fact were those of their doctors." "'You have to realse,' he whispered to me when a nurse had declined to answer a direct question about his suspected cancer, 'that the first and most important job of medical science is to protect the profession from the patients. We unsettle them and make them feel vaguely guilty. We ask questions they know they can't answer--the only thing they really want us to do is go away, or pretend that there's nothing wrong with us. What they like best of all is to admit us to hospital and then hear us say we feel fine, even if we're at death's door.'" Id. at 295.).
John Banville, Ancient Light: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("The statisticians tell us there is no such thing as coincidence, and I must accept they know what they are talking about. If I were to believe that a certain confluence of events was a special and unique phenomenon outside the ordinary flow of happenstance I woold have to accept, as I do not, that there is a transcendent process at work above, or behind, or within, commonplace reality. And yet I ask myself, why not? Why should I not allow of a secret and sly arranger of seemingly chance events?....Why was she there, and why was he?" Id. at 175-176.).
Roberto Bolano, Woes of the True Policeman: A Novel, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011, 2012) ("...but all I became was s literature professor. At least, thought Amalfitano, I've read thousands of books. At least I've become acquainted with the Poets and read the Novels.... At least I've read. At least I can still read, he said to himself, at once dubious and hopeful." Id. at 86.).
James M. Cain, The Cocktail Waitress (London: Hard Case Crime Novel/Titan Books, 2012).
T. Coraghessan Boyle, San Miguel: A Novel (New York: Viking, 2012) (Also, see Tatjana Soli, "Untamed Island," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/28/2012.).
Stephen L. Carter, The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("It is in the nature of men, sir, especially great men, to see themselves as indispensable. Whereas it is in the nature of women to see their friends and families as indispensable." Id. at 454.).
Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue: A Novel (New York: Harper, 2012) ("Gwen followed Aviva into the bathroom, fighting the urge to apologize, wanting to point out that if you were white, eating shit was a choice you could make if you wanted; for a black woman, the only valid choice was not to." Id. at 60-61. "'I bet Gwen feels like she's been living in a fantasy world. Black midwife and a million white mommies. Black people live their wholes lives in a fantasy world, it is just not their fantasy.'" Id. at 363.).
Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories (New York: Picador, 1999) (From "Green's Book": "Emily turned to Green. 'What is it with this tattoo shit, Marty? Can you explain this phenomenon?' 'Well,' Green said. He could feel the weak grin guttering on his lips. He knew what Freud had said about tattooing, of course, and he had his own private theory that people who tattooed themselves, particularly the young men and women one saw doing it today, were practicing a kind of desperate act of self-assertion through legerdemain, holding a candle to a phrase written in invisible ink, raising letters and lines where before there had been only the blankest sheet of paper. Don't throw me away, they were saying. I bare a hidden message. 'It's difficult to say.'" Id. at 83, 97.).
Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012) ("She was depressed and sad and missed her father and her friends, our neighbors. Everyone had warned her that the U.S. was a difficult place where even the Devil got his ass beat...." Id. at 138. Also see, Leah Hager Cohen, "Love Stories," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 9/23/2012; and Francine Prose, "Beyond the Circle," New York Review of Books, 11/8/2012).
Dave Eggers, A Hologram For the King: A Novel (San Francisco: McSweeney's Books, 2012) ("'Dear Kit, The key thing is managed awareness of your role in the world and history. Think too much and you know you are nothing. Think just enough and you know you are small, but important to some. That's the best you can do'" Id. at 102-103.).
Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists: A Novel (New York: Weinstein Books, 2012) ("For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past." Id. at 25. "'...The garden has to reach inside you. It should change your heart, sadden it, uplift it. It has to make you appreciate the impermanence of everything in life,' I say. 'That point in time just as the last leaf is about to drop, as the remaining petal is about to fall; the moment captures everything beautiful and sorrowful about life. 'Mono no aware,' the Japanese call it.'" Id. at 163.).
Peter Heller, The Dog Stars: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("That we have come to this: remaking our own taboos forgetting the original reasons but still awash in warnings." Id. at 48. "The difference maybe between the living and the dead: the living often want to be numb the dead never do, if they never want anything." Id. at 158. "All the choices we can't see. Every moment." Id. at 212.).
Scott Hutchins, A Working Theory of Love: A Novel (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012) ("[T]his is the great peril of bachelorhood--that you 'll become airy and insubstantial that people will peer straight through you." Id. at 4. Also, see James Hynes, "Fooled Again," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/25/2012.).
Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station: A Novel (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2011) (From the backcover: "In prose that veers between the comic and the tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle.").
Henning Mankell, The Shadow Girls: A Novel, translated from the Swedish by Ebba Segerberg (New York: New Press, 2011, 2012.) ("Jesper had been the youngest of four and had seen his siblings leave home as quickly as they had been able. At twenty he informed his mother that his turn had come. When Jesper woke the following morning he couldn't move. His mother had tied him to the bed. It took him a whole day to talk her into letting him go. First she had forced him to promise to come and see her three times a week for the rest of her life." Id. at 33.).
Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth: A Novel (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2012) ("As I saw it, Professor Canning was suffering from a gross intellectual malfunction." Id. at 30. Also, see Kurt Andersen, "I Spy," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/25/2012.).
Lawrence Osborne, The Forgiven: A Novel (London & New York: Hogarth, 2012) ("Truly, the world had not promised anything to anyone and no man ever lived the way he wished." Id. at 64.).
Orhan Pamuk, Silent House: A Novel, translated from the Turkish by Robert Finn (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("[L]et me at least give you some final advice, listen to me, Recep: be open-minded and free, and only trust your own intelligence, do you understand? I was silent, hanging my head, and I thought: Words! Pluck the fruit of knowledge form the tree in paradise, Recep, take it without fear, maybe you will writhe in pain, but you'll be free, and when everyone is free the true paradise will be established, the real paradise on this earth where you will have nothing to fear. Words, I was thinking, a bunch of sounds, that are said and then vanish into the air . . . I fell fell asleep thinking of them" Id. at 310. Also, see Francine Prose, "Broken Homeland," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 11/21/2012.).
Philip Pullman, Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version (New York: Viking, 2012) ("There is no psychology in a fairy tale. The characters have little interior life; their motives are clear and obvious. If people are good, they are good, and if bad, they're bad.... The tremors and mysteries of human awareness, the whispers of memory, the prompting of half-understood regret or doubt or desire that are so much part of the subject matter of the modern novel are absent entirely. One might almost say that the characters in a fairy tale are not actually conscious." Id. at xiii.).
Carlos Ruiz Zafon The Prisoner of Heaven: A Novel, translated from the Spanish by Lucia Graves (New York: Harper, 2011, 2012) ("'In this world, everything is a fake, young man. Everything except money.'" Id. at 12. "'[I]f you don't trust a novelist, who are you going to trust?'" Id. at 194.).
Will Self, Umbrella (New York: Grove Press, 2012).
Robert Sheckley, Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley, edited by Alex Abramovish & Jonathan Lethem (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).
Steve Stern, The Book of Mischief: New and Selected Stories (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2012) (From 'Moishe the Just': "When you expose one just man, you as good as exposed the lot. We understood this better after the storm finally broke in Europe." Id. at 109, 123.).
Amor Towles, Rules of Civility: A Novel (New York: Viking, 2011).
Mario Vargas LLosa, The Dream of the Celt: A Novel, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010, 2012) ("Was all of history like that? The history learned at school? The one written by historians? A more or less idyllic fabrication, rational and coherent, about what had been in raw, harsh reality a chaotic and arbitrary jumble of plans, accidents, intrigues, fortuitous events, coincidences, multiple interests that had provoked changes, upheavals advances, and retreats, always unexpected and surprising with respect to what was anticipate or experienced by the protagonists." Id. at 98.).
Tom Wolfe, Back to Blood: A Novel (New York & Boston: Little, Brown, 2012) (Also, see Thomas Mallon, "The Heat Is On," NYT Book Review, Sunday, October 28, 2012.).
Stefan Zweig, Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. von D., translated from the German by Anthea Bell, and with an Introduction by George Prochnik (New York: New York Review Books, 2012).
