Our columnist offers three classic titles to take to the ocean in the summer of 2018

Bookworm: 2018 Russia, 2008 Russia, 19th-century Russia, and America all star in the new novel by the author of ‘All the Sad Young Literary Men’

Bookworm: The Austrian novelist dissects a broken heart

Bookworm: Like James Gatz, my grandfather from the Ottoman Empire reinvented himself in America

Bookworm: The master of fiction shares some rules for writing, then neglects to follow them himself

Bookworm: The Washington hand’s debut thriller ‘The Hellfire Club’ delivers

Bookworm: On his own time and not on Mr. Hand’s time, Sean Penn composed ‘Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff,’ but what for?

Bookworm: Gangsters, kidnappers, a pencil-maker, a Shakespearean actor, a toothpaste magnate, and other 20th-century ghosts in Daniel Wakin’s surprising new account of a section of Riverside Drive

Bookworm: A new first translation of the French writer’s wartime epic

Bookworm: 35 years after the author’s death this month, his timeless classic ‘Darkness at Noon’ still reverberates from inside its tiny prison cell

Bookworm: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar wrote what could have been edited into one of the great novels of the 20th century

Bookworm: Sex, barbiturates, and the internal lives of women, in a flawlessly crafted and perfectly unstylish seminal work of American culture

Bookworm: The scoundrel hero of the Hungarian writer’s play ‘Liliom’ steals a star from heaven

Bookworm: Paul Goldberg’s detective novel is hot on the trail of… the detective novel

Bookworm: So what if the festival of lights has some magic?