Philip Connors

Unless you’re the jealous type, it’s fun to read reviews of Junot Díaz in mainstream American papers. There may not be an American writer alive whose ratio of positive to negative press is more favourable; critics do backflips for the guy. Unfortunately, given the corporate prudery of their employers, they can’t quote his most perfervid prose. I offer this from his new...

Misha Vainberg, like a twisted 21st-century Whitman, contains multitudes. Son of the 1238th richest man in Russia. Graduate of Accidental College in the American Midwest, with a degree in multicultural studies. Victim of a botched circumcision at the hands of Hasidim in New York. A 325-pound behemoth with a fondness for grilled sturgeon and fried chicken wings. Possessor of a ‘toxic...

Cormac McCarthy has offered us nightmares before. In Outer Dark (1968) he conjured a twisted version of the Nativity in which a child is conceived in incest, abandoned in the woods, sought for months by his mother, and eventually murdered in front of his father by a man who slits his throat. In Child of God (1973) McCarthy imagined a serial murderer and necrophiliac who abducts his unwitting...

Timmy O’Kane, the protagonist of Anthony Giardina’s fourth novel, lives in suburban Massachusetts and works as a salesman for an academic publisher. He visits universities and tries to persuade professors to buy the firm’s anthologies, the most popular of which he calls ‘White Guys’:

‘White Guys’ sells in the hundreds of thousands annually. It is the...