fiction

Novelist Thomas M. Disch killed himself in his New York apartment on July 5.

Endzone, Disch's blog, was one of the Web's cheeriest and one of its darkest. It derived its cheer from a reckless, desperate wit, often expressed by ridiculing, lampooning, or harassing enemies and professional associates who had crossed him. The ancient blogger wisdom about counting to a thousand before posting a personal attack seemed not to have reached him, and the effect was amusing and bracing. When an editor at FSG rejected an introduction he had written to the poems of Allen Tate, Disch responded with a short verse-cycle, childish and pissy, denouncing the editor, quite unfairly, by name. (Disch could write well about other people's poetry, but he was an eccentric choice for a Tate introduction.)

A genealogist exposed Surviving with Wolves, Misha Defonseca's celebrated memoir of the Holocaust, as a pack of lies.

In Zimbabwe, for a few months during the early stages of the collapse of civil society under Robert Mugabe, I flitted from bookshop to bookshop, happy as a hummingbird in a tropical greenhouse. Paperbacks cost as little as a penny apiece, and hardbacks rarely topped a single US dollar. The inventory consisted largely of remainders or possibly even of books reported by distributors as unsold and destroyed. And one book was everywhere: Fragments, the 1995 Holocaust fraud by Binjamin Wilkomirski. MORE

Australian novelist Peter Carey's new book His Illegal Self tells the story of the kidnapping of the eight-year-old son of radical parents.

The boy at the center of this novel is a sort of Sixties royalty, a princeling of the radical left. The son of two figures sufficiently extreme to have concocted bombs and appeared on national news, his name is Che ("Jay," insists his patrician grandmother, his legal custodian after abandonment by his mother), and he's too young to know that the obligations of royalty are manifold, and rarely chosen. MORE