James Traub

James Traub is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His new history of Times Square, The Devil’s Playground, has just been published by Random House.

Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac (Viking, $15). Balzac was France’s Tolstoy—the man who understood everything about everything. Here a bright young fellow abandons small-town life for the blazing glory of Paris and the life of corrupting vanity—to which Balzac, unlike Tolstoy, was magnetically attracted.

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (Penguin, $15). “I am an American, Chicago-born,” announces our narrator, a Jewish street kid who dares to be worthy of the epic tradition of Balzac. The young Bellow was as tough-minded as the old, but less cynical, less prone to lecture, more hungry for understanding. This is the Great American Novel.

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A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, $13). Here Naipaul’s lifelong narrative of half-made men and wounded civilizations takes the form not of righteous polemic but of pathos. A rapt sense of beauty and the dismal trajectory of the protagonist’s life envelope this novel in a solemn hush. Too solemn, perhaps? Then read A House for Mister Biswas, Naipaul’s Augie March.

The Russian Debutante’s Handbook by Gary Shteyngart (Riverhead, $14). Shteyngart is not the Bellow but the Roth of the slacker generation. He is a priceless mimic, an ardent lover, a nervous adventurer, a winning schlemiel. The loopy and nightmarish events transacted in his fictional post-communist Prague—or is it Bucharest?—are the script of the greatest Woody Allen movie never made.

The Telephone Booth Indian by A.J. Liebling (Broadway, $12). Liebling once said, “I write—faster than anyone who writes better.” And funnier, he could have added, than anyone who wrote anything. This collection features the Broadway Liebling, the delineator of small-time con artists, tumblers, vaudeville has-beens, and the like. But any collection will do.

What a Time It Was