Decent sci-fi allegory, but no “Master & Margarita.”

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A dreamlike page-turner (though with sometimes stilted prose) with an ending that might frustrate someone expecting Hitchcock.

Brief but informative and well writen. Can’t say I care much for Eagleton’s strident and assured belief in scientific Marxism, but what can you do.

It has its moments, but not one of my favorite books by Kafka.

I had never heard of Avram Davidson until he was mentioned on Crooked Timber, though I swear I must’ve read “The Golem” before. What a great find!

Funny, chilling, and marvelous. I can’t believe I never had read this before.

Brilliant, funny. Along with “Tristram Shandy,” this is an early exploration of paths largely ignored by other novelists until the 20th century.

Written by a respected folklorist for a small press in North Carolina, this prints a recently discovered folk poem that purports to tell the true story of the popular murder ballad victim. Using this as a key, Wilgus-Long performs a stanzaic comparison of every version of the Naomi Wise ballad that she could get her hands on, attempting to construct a sort of ur-version of “Naomi Wise.” Interesting, but probably only to students and scholars of native American folk ballads.

A “doppelganger mystery” involving a detestable narrator, some delightful metafictional meanderings, and suspiciously overt potshots at Marxist vanguardism. The fun here lies in negotiating the unreliable narration and, of course, Nabokov’s self-consciously purple prose.