For such a small book, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter has an awful lot to say. In it, the Argentine author César Aira takes as his subject the very nature of artistic representation and how perception itself can change drastically amid events of personal and political upheaval. He writes here in a documentary style befitting of his protagonist, the 19th-century German painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, who followed an expedition to Mexico, Chile and Argentina to capture and document in scientific detail the still-unspoiled landscapes. As you might guess, he and his trusty sidekick Krause quickly find themselves in a series of scrapes and misadventures worthy of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, though these — involving locusts and lightning and Indians — are more terrifying than any windmills.

Without giving too much away, a disfiguring calamity strikes Rugendas, but it's one that provides an entirely new way of seeing the natural world around him. The novel reads like an old-fashioned adventure story for boys rewritten by some malcontent art historian over at PAFA. It's probably not too much of a stretch to suggest that Aira, as the author of over 30 books, identifies in some way with his hero's efforts to render the visible world into some semblance of artistic order. "The precise arrangement of physiognomic elements in the picture would speak volumes to the observer's sensibility, conveying information not in the form of isolated features but features systematically interrelated so as to be intuitively grasped: climate, history, customs, economy, race, fauna, flora, rainfall, prevailing winds." In his ability to so startlingly describe the tension of culture clash in Latin America and render complicated history into such lovely and succinct prose, in An Episode Aira makes even Gabriel Garcia M‡rquez look like a pinata full of hot air.

Washington Post book review editor Marie Arana has woven an absolutely spellbinding tale in her debut novel, Cellophane. Set mainly in the Peruvian rain forest town of Floralinda — invisible on any map — this is a dense but highly stylized story involving papermaking, witchcraft and love.

The fantastic prologue — which is indicative of the novel's extraordinary, lush and dreamy narrative — features the novel's hero Don Victor Sobrevilla as an impressionable young boy mesmerized by a poster of Iquitos. Becoming an engineer, he heads out to the jungle, where he builds a hacienda for his large family and creates a papermaking empire. Furthermore, Don Victor lives his life by adhering to the prophecy — handed to him by a monkey — which tells him how to pursue his dreams and realize his goals, in part by worshipping the Virgin of Copacabana.

Arana's prose is captivating, and she provides some incredibly beguiling moments. The story begins with a "plague of tongues" in which Don Victor, along with his priest, and members of his family, start spilling their secrets and telling truths, which have intriguing repercussions for everyone.

The second third of the novel plays out the romances that develop as a result of these revelations, and fascinating romantic characters such as a Peruvian tribeswoman, or an American cartographer are introduced. Arana connects all of this drama in the last section of the book with the tissue that is cellophane, the extravagant paper Don Victor makes that causes all of the trouble.

Lovers of Latin American fiction will be dazzled by what unfolds in Cellophane. The author creates magical scenes of butterflies fluttering out of hats, plots involving headshrinkers, and peepholes that expose erotic affairs. Arana is equally masterful in her plotting and her language — but even more so in understanding the power of prediction and matters of the human heart.

"You can never know who is crueler, men or women," observes Holly, Jami Attenberg's de facto main character in her first novel. "It depends on how strong your back is when it is pushed up against that wall." Instant Love could easily make the case that it is the latter who are crueler, from Maggie, who marries a man she doesn't particularly like because he helped an old lady move, to Holly herself, who knows she is being unkind to an overweight suitor but can't bring herself to tell him what he wants to hear. But perhaps it is men who have made them this way? Maggie and Holly's father "was too busy fucking his grad-student groupies to worry about how [they] turned out," and of course both women have experienced not-so-nice boyfriends. But Attenberg is not necessarily interested in who claims the title of crueler sex; her fascination is the moment at which a person falls in love — or resigns herself to it. In a series of what could easily be stand-alone short stories in which minor characters cross over and become major ones, Maggie and Holly and several other women experience sex and love, as well as approximations of both, and contemplate all of it with a snarky, unsentimental wit. Holly says, "There's too much agitation over words in our lives. … I know my own words tumble out sometimes like ill-behaved children rolling down a hill after church while wearing their Sunday finery. Messy, messy words." And it's true that here, Attenberg misses the mark at times, going for the too-obvious metaphor or too-clever joke: "It turns out she's no good at blending in the makeup. She's going to suck at blending in for the rest of her life." But for the most part, Attenberg's language is spot-on, walking that fine line between cutesy and brilliant with stunning alacrity: "Not a lot of people think to call Ph.D. candidates in biology 'tramp,' but we like it just like everyone else. Not 'hussy,' though. We hate that."

How do you review a "novel" written by a guy you went to high school with that happens to be set in the town you rattled around in for 18 years, circles the crystalline Midwestern lake to which you regularly cut class to escape the pettiness of your classmates, framed loosely by the high school where you did your time, and features characters you vaguely remember from those happily forgotten years?

No doubt, Bryan Charles, in his debut novel, Grab On to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way, remembers those years far more vividly than I (not that I particularly want to, having vowed never to return to the halls of Gull Lake High School). Congrats from Philly, Bryan.

The novel's narrator, Vim Sweeney, finds himself in that strange land straddling high school and college struggling to make sense of his motley assortment of friends and their girlfriends, his love for his mother and the long stifled thorny resentments he harbors toward the father who abandoned them years before. This memoir disguised as a novel can be gratuitous — although perhaps masturbatory would be a better word given Vim's fixation with body parts, fluids and functions — but ultimately manages to rise above its flaws to give voice to teenage malcontent.

Charles — er, Vim — wanders around the rural suburbs of Kalamazoo, his only child's active mind looping silent, internal, run-on monologues about hometown hero Derek Jeter, his bandmate's fucked-up girlfriend, the meaning of his existence, Desert Storm or Shield, and the lame grungy classic rock slurry we listened to around there around then.

Charles' Vim does a fine job capturing the otherworldliness of that gap summer, that uncomfortable time where teens leave the comfortable known quantity of their world to begin exploring something, anything else.

At its heart (there's not a lot of that here, so you can't miss it), The Catastrophist is a coolly written black comedy of manners about the travels and troubles, real and imagined, of art historian Daniel Wellington. A tenured sensation in the hierarchy-conscious Northeast, the steady, married, studied Wellington freaks at the quickening prospects of childbirth and a post involving the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. Laughs ensue — dry ones — as Wellington's mind and maleness unspool in a shocking display of sudden self-loathing. Think of it as an acid satire a la Bonfire of the Vanities (with big dollops of Philip Roth), only one switching Wolfe's richly arch takes on racism and class wars with teardowns of male crisis, art and higher learning.

Amherst-based author and law professor Douglas has been down this road before with nonfiction works The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust and his co-authorship of Sense and Nonsensibility: Lampoons of Learning and Literature. Serious stuff. And it shows as he takes to sharing those interests in first-novel form.

Some of Douglas' cruelly hum-ored fare is juicy: Wellington's false claims of being a Holocaust survivors' scion; his rude sexual remarks to a student; his vividly depicted, almost medicinally depicted dread at the future horrors fatherhood will bring. He's down. Really down.

But Wellington's action comes off so morbidly sudden and without root, it feels misplaced. This leaves Douglas' iciest witticisms sounding applied — like a cold pack — and dully misanthropic, rather than sewn through the fabric of the put-upon lost soul that is Wellington.

The Keep opens in the shadow of a crumbling castle, one that nevertheless looks "solid as hell" under a dim moon; its story begins as a tale of childhood pranks and familial bonds before mushrooming into a meditation on imprisonment and reinvention. That castle is being refurbished by a cashed-out moneyman who — like all The Keep's characters — is looking for a way out of the world he exists in. He's driven by a desire to live in a world free of fiber-optic cables and buzzing BlackBerries, and his chief antagonist — and childhood tormentor — is, at the book's outset, looking for nothing more than a way back into that realm of hyperconnectivity. The Keep shape-shifts from there, but that tension — between the inner self and the connected self, between the hum of the outside world and the insistent, elliptical chatter of one's brain after that white noise stops — remains throughout.

Jennifer Egan, author of the riveting Look at Me, reveals herself once again as a master of wriggling from fiction's constraints; throughout The Keep, perspectives shift, narrators come out of hiding, and hallucinations, both drug-induced and paranoia-fueled, are given free rein across pages and chapters. These situations play out among a collection of people who are, across the board, trapped in their own private hells, ones covered by a medieval haze of death, frustration and addiction. In lesser hands, this could be a recipe for a warmed-over episode of Starting Over; what makes Egan's novel such a mind-blowing experience is the full-bodiedness of each person she's breathed life into, and the way their shared, unquenchable thirst — for an escape from the lives they've created for themselves — is revealed.

A novel whose inspiration is the real-life murder of a pregnant woman in Boston is bound to be somewhat overwrought and perhaps even a bit sentimental, but it's a bad sign when it calls to mind a very long Bruce Springsteen B-side. Anthony Giardina's story of boys growing up together and eventually getting out of down-on-its-luck Winship, Mass., and what happens to their lives and their friendships in suburban adulthood is so full of nostalgic reverie about girls in tight sweaters ("Oh, the girls of those years") and how much the sleepy Boston beach towns have changed since those halcyon days that it's difficult to get involved in the story until about halfway through. There is a kind of storytelling that so self-consciously sounds like voiceover that it is nearly impossibly not to think the author is begging for an option on a screenplay: "You have to imagine, maybe, in order to understand what happened next, the way I looked in those days." The reintroduction of Billy, the boys' friend from childhood who never got out of Winship, into their lives brings back old feelings, of course, and makes narrator Timmy O'Kane re-examine his comfortable suburban life in a manner that only lends itself to a more self-conscious writing style. He says, "I think we each understood that in going home tonight, our lives would feel slightly different," and his life is different, but we knew it would be from the pregnant-with-meaning passages that pop up on every page. Ultimately, the real shame of White Guys is not its rote characters, predictable plot or increasingly intrusive narrative nostalgia, but that these things overwhelm the sweeter, subtler moments of the novel, which occur when Tim interacts with his father, a chain-smoking and not particularly ambitious man who can't quite understand his son's successful suburban life or figure out how to talk to him about it. These scenes suggest that perhaps a less ambitious undertaking would have showcased Giardina's talents better.

Aidan Higgins has to date published a dozen books of fiction and non, including this letter bomb of a book, Bornholm Night-Ferry, which first appeared in the U.K. over 20 years ago and has finally now washed up on our shores. Admirers of the fictions of James Joyce and his most immediate descendents, Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien, will want to take notice of this steadily growing oeuvre because in terms of language Higgins' best fiction definitely converses in many complex ways with those giants of Irish literature. In some ways a traditional epistolary novel, Bornholm Night-Ferry unravels through a series of letters back and forth between Finn "Fitzy" FitzGerald, and his Danish lover, Elin Marstrander. Their correspondence takes on a life of its own, seemingly independent of the mundane realities of their separate, shacked-up-with-other-people lives.

Higgins masterfully uses subtle and, I admit, sometimes not-so-subtle shifts in tone and syntax to convey carefully nuanced changes in the lovers' emotional dispositions. He is by all reasonable accounts an amazingly cunning linguist. The unabashed eroticism of their early letters only slowly gives way to the understanding that Finn and Elin's affection is so ephemeral that it may not survive the occasional, yearned-for reunion. The idea of their affair means more to them than the affair itself. "I love the language," Elin writes early on to Finn, "my own and others, the language as tool, the language which is keeping or effacing, the language you can come to the truth with or be lying with. I needed the words to entertain you, to amuse you, put my seal into your heart so you can never forget me." Their loving correspondence is ultimately about language itself, and it's the language itself that makes this melancholy novel so enjoyable.

I recall discovering Anne Tyler in the late 1970s when her quirky novels (Celestial Navigation, If Morning Ever Comes) were packaged as paperback romances. Through Hollywood-adapted The Accidental Tourist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Breathing Lessons to this year's luminous Digging to America, Tyler's fiction reveals gentleness, unaffected humor and surprising insights.

Digging to America features Tyler's beloved Baltimore, but examines America's awkward cultural stew — something she's experienced through her four-decade marriage to an Iranian.

Sami and Ziba Yazdan meet Bitsy and Brad Donaldson when both couples adopt Korean infants. "Arrival Day" becomes their annual holiday, and the two tribes form one unlikely family. Tyler starts from Sami's mother's point of view: Maryam, a coolly regal, deeply private widow who at 19 escaped the Shah's crumbling empire through arranged marriage, is fascinated and repelled by the Donaldsons' clumsy liberalism and chummy loudness.

Once we're comfortable with Maryam's vantage, Tyler shifts focus, allowing access to Sami, Ziba, Bitsy, her father Dave — a widower smitten with Maryam — and, most revealingly and charmingly, 5-year-old Jin-Ho Donaldson's point of view. Tyler's elegant prose renders even peripheral characters three-dimensional, and we're soon part of the family.

Tyler's larger themes about complicated cultural blending emerge personally, with no forced messages or easy solutions: "You can't object to his Americanness," Ziba scolds Maryam about Dave, "and then fault him for trying to act Iranian. It's not logical." Precious little is logical, Tyler reveals, on an intimate, day-by-day level: We're all just feeling our way.

These endearing characters' efforts to navigate between cultures, in our increasingly xenophobic times, make Digging to America an important novel. Her insight into seemingly ordinary characters — men and women, infants to seniors — makes it richly satisfying and universal. As with all Tyler's novels, the central subject proves to be, in a mature, masterful way, love: Isn't "the real culture clash," she asks, "the one between the two sexes?"