A prophet-provacateur faithful to French traditions of lucidity, sensuality, and alienation, Houellebecq believes we are all doomed. The Map and the Territory continues his great project of exposing the limits of individualism.

All rights reserved

The definitive U.S. comic strip of the last two decades features workplace alienation, managerial dysfunction, and socio-economic stratification. Last month its creator announced he's running for President as an independent. His candidacy may not be serious, but how about his policies?

In The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst explored the iconoclasm of the Thatcher years. But in A Stranger's Child, he seems to portray England as a country self-defeatingly focused on its past

A recurring idea in the work of Milan Kundera is that the spirit of totalitarianism lives on in our mass media. In a world without privacy, will we all be perpetually on trial?

Etgar Keret is an Israeli author of urgent, cryptic, popular fiction. His fantasies can be read as coping strategies for a violent world of irresolvable moral ambiguities

Jennifer Egan's fiction asks whether our experience is now technologically mediated to the point that we routinely mistake the map for the territory. In her book A Visit from the Goon Squad, she evokes a world where the pressure constantly to self-reinvent threatens to erode our sense of identity.

Dostoevsky was in favor of military intervention in the Balkans, Tolstoy opposed to it. The arguments they put forward are surprisingly relevant to our own current wars.

Humans are the only species who feel we have a responsibility to other species. T.C. Boyle's fiction explores the dilemmas raised when our obligations to other species and organisms conflict

The greatest novel has probably been written, while the greatest computer game is still almost certainly to come. Will the medium change us enough to turn itself into mainstream art, as the novel once did?

The hero - or antihero - of James Warner's darkly comic novel All Her Father's Guns is Libertarian venture capitalist Cal Lyte. It is 2002, and Cal's ex-wife Tabytha is seeking the Republican nomination in an Arizonan Congressional district with a Democrat incumbent. In this scene, Cal drives from Nevada to Arizona to install listening devices in Tabytha's house, and to inform her he has tracked down their old Guatemalan nanny who was an illegal immigrant -- politically sensitive information he hopes will persuade her to drop her lawsuit against him for additional alimony. You can buy the book here

"In A Strange Room" is South African writer Damon Galgut's new collection of stories. The difficulty of coexistence between travellers trying to get along seems to speak to the current condition of his homeland.

J.D. Salinger died on the 27th of January, 2010. James Warner paints a portrait of the American writer's work - loved by the public but attacked by some critics - and his solitary life