Mario Alberto Zambrano has had a soaring career as a contemporary ballet dancer, refining moves with some of the most innovative dance troupes in Germany, Israel and the Netherlands. Now Zambrano choreographs words.His debut novel, “Loteria,” is out. It’s a polished tome of prose unreeling the tale of plucky little Luz Maria Castillo in the game of chance called life.Memories stir and storm for the 11-year-old narrator, Luz, as she flips over cards from the Mexican bingo-like game called loteria

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Anne Tyler has never liked “The Taming of the Shrew.”“I have no favorite moments in this play,” Tyler said. “I first read it in college and disliked it intensely, and I can’t say my attitude toward it softened any when I read it again just recently.”Very soon, Tyler is going to get a chance to reimagine and make sense of “The Taming of the Shrew.” She’s writing a novel based on the play as part of a project by the publishing house Hogarth to commission novels base

& SonsBy David Gilbert (Random House)The ghost of J.D. Salinger hovers over David Gilbert’s new novel, “& Sons.” Set amid the wealth and privilege of Manhattan’s toniest neighborhood, the novel centers on A.N. Dyer, a reclusive author best known for his coming-of-age story set in a boys’ prep school.When the novel begins, Dyer is preparing to deliver a eulogy for his lifelong friend Charles Henry Topping at a church in the heart of the blue-blood district that Gilbert knows and writes about so w

NEW YORK (AP) ― Put Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan on a stage and expect a night of high art and school boy humor, of reading, writing and Christopher Hitchens.And hysterical sex.The three literary stars, all in their 60s and friends for more than half their lives, appeared together Monday night at the 92nd Street Y on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Amis and McEwan were there to read from their latest novels, both now out in paperback. Rushdie handled the introductions and the question

Mystery GirlBy David Gordon (Thomas & Mercer/New Harvest) The main character in David Gordon’s 2010 debut thriller, “The Serialist,” was a novelist hired to write a serial killer’s memoirs. Now, in “Mystery Girl,” he introduces a new protagonist, a failed experimental novelist named Sam Kornberg who finds work as an assistant to a private detective.Gordon writes about writers because one of the things his books are about is the nature of storytelling itself.“Does your life work like that?” Sam s

Massacre PondBy Paul Doiron (Minotaur)Elizabeth Morse, who made her fortune selling worthless herbal remedies to the gullible, is buying up huge parcels of timberland in Eastern Maine with the hope of persuading the federal government to turn it into a national park.The locals don’t like it one bit. She’s put land they’ve fished and hunted for generations off-limits. Worse, she’s killing forestry industry jobs.So trouble is sure to come to the backwater of lakes and forests patrolled by Maine ga

In the July-August issue of the Atlantic, Joseph Epstein uses the release of Saul Friedlander’s book “Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt” to pose the larger question of whether Kafka is still relevant.“Great writers are impressed by the mysteries of life; poor Franz Kafka was crushed by them,” he observes, noting that “Kafka’s small body of work, which includes three uncompleted novels, some two dozen substantial short stories, an assemblage of parables and fragment-like shorter works, dia

Leo Hollis should have had me at the title. His book “Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis” seeks to articulate something I take as an article of faith: Cities are the only place to live.And yet, even the title highlights some of the problems with this uneven inquiry into urban life. It might have been radical to champion the city 30 years ago, when crime rates were high and the middle-class exodus to the suburbs remained in full swing. We live, however, in a different era, when