Like an Israeli Kafka who embodies the notion of brevity as the soul of wit, Etgar Keret (The Nimrod Flipout) spins stories about men - men who have recently been left by their wives or girlfriends, men who are insecure in their current relationships, men who want to be loved.

Suddenly, a Knock on the Door is a slim book of only 188 pages, but it contains 36 of Keret's gems, each of which combines humor with human frailty to great effect.

Review of Suddenly, a Knock on the Door by Etgar Keret

_{Photo: Farrar, Straus and Giroux}

Karen Russell won the New York Public Library's 2012 Young Lions Fiction award last night for Swamplandia, her debut novel about an average, everyday family and their alligator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades.

Written in 1998 and published this year, Lionel Shriver's The New Republic is a surprisingly timely and insightful satire hitched to the old quip, "What if they threw a war and know one came?" Shriver's reporter protagonist, Edgar E. Kellogg travels on assignment to the Southern tip of Portugal to cover a fictitious terrorist group and, while there, finds something else entirely.

Review of The New Republic by Lionel Shriver

_{Photo: HarperCollins}

Award-winning author and illustrator Maurice Sendak died of a stroke today at the age of 83. Most widely known for Where the Wild Things Are, which he both wrote and illustrated and for which he won the Caldecott Medal in 1964, Sendak both wrote and illustrated numerous other works including In the Night Kitchen (1970) and Outside Over There (1981).

And when he came to the place where the wild things are
they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth
and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws
till Max said "BE STILL!"
and tamed them with the magic trick
of staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once
and they were frightened and called him the most wild thing of all
and made him king of all wild things
"And now," cried Max, "let the wild rumpus start!"

_{Photo: Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak}