These anthologies have focused almost exclusively on fiction, ignoring a wealth of extraordinary true-life narratives.

Chabon’s last two major novels embraced his abiding love for genre fiction, trading in the set pieces and personae of explicitly imaginary worlds: the vivid comic book narratives threaded throughout The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, followed by the alternate history and homage to the hardboiled detective novel that is The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. With Telegraph Avenue, his latest novel, Chabon returns to the present and to recognizable geographies—but happily, its world is constructed and populated with the same fantastically concrete sensibility of the world-builder.

Interviews

Interview by Rhys Tranter
It is worth bearing in mind that when the project was launched, back while Beckett was still alive, nobody, least of all Beckett himself (who hadthose same years of childhood were also a period of atrocity. They coincided with the middle of Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship, which began with an overthrow of the democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. During this time, thousands were disappeared, murdered, and tortured.

Review by Chris Fletcher
Readers who go into Laird Hunt’s Kind One looking for kindly characters are presented with an array of unlikely candidates. It simply cannot be Linus Lancaster, a farmer with delusions of grandeur (his farm is named Paradise) who beats his wife Ginny, rapes his young female slaves Cleome and Zinnia, and whips Alcofibras, the slave who tends his garden, to death. Yet, Lancaster has his own problems: on page 84 he is dead of a pig-sticker in the back of