Scholars have argued that childhood is a relatively recent invention, a concept that didn’t exist until the seventeenth century. If that’s the case, perhaps adulthood is equally suspect. Wouldn’t we be better off admitting that “grown-ups” are merely oversize, car-driving, money-juggling kids, instead of pretending to an ascendancy we rarely merit? The idea that we’re all just aging, idiosyncratic children snatching at happiness is central to Ms. Hempel Chronicles, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s gently, deeply affecting second novel.

The Indian Ocean, with its ancient patterns of trade and empire, has buoyed Amitav Ghosh’s writing for twenty years. The Shadow Lines (1988), his second novel, examines the partition of Bengal, while his anthropological travelogue In an Antique Land (1992) probes age-old ties between India and Egypt. The best-selling novel The Glass Palace (2000) is set between Burma and India circa the Second World War, and The Hungry Tide (2004) explores the mangrove forests and marginal peoples of the Sundarbans tidal plain. His sixth novel, the first in a projected trilogy, traces the global effects of a gargantuan drug-trafficking enterprise.

The work of António Lobo Antunes is held in such high regard that when José Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1998, there was grumbling that it had gone to the wrong Portuguese writer. Only about half of Lobo Antunes’s sixteen novels have made it into English, though. Now, Gregory Rabassa has translated his 2001 What Can I Do When Everything’s on Fire? in a version so (predictably) elegant that at times I wondered whether the lowlife drag queens and junkies who people it sound so immaculate in the original.

One could thumbnail The Pisstown Chaos, David Ohle’s third novel in thirty-odd years, as a dark-comic fantasia, and the author himself as a long-term toiler in the fields of postwar American experimentalism. And yet he remains elusive, far more obscure than he deserves to be, and the book, like the rest of Ohle’s small oeuvre, is a bit hard to account for. His first book, Motorman, from 1972, could be situated within the vein of Barthelme et al.; but what came after—well, what came after was silence. Decades passed, the debut accruing cult status all the while, until the appearance

Myers, the hapless, briefcase-toting nine-to-fiver of Deb Olin Unferth’s debut novel, Vacation, wonders why his wife has suddenly started coming home late from work “mussed” and “ruddy.” When he begins leaving his office at the end of each day, going to her office, and following her, he discovers that she is indeed cheating on him—albeit only emotionally. She’s been coming home late because she leaves work, goes to yet another office, and follows a strange man, who, coincidentally, is an acquaintance of Myers’s from college.

Daphne Beal’s first book might be considered an exemplar of what Edmund White recently characterized as the “Peace Corps novel,” in which a “young, privileged American” travels to another country and is transformed by the experience. “I wanted to come home different from what I’d been—bolder, wiser, happier,” insists the narrator of In the Land of No Right Angles, recounting her peregrinations through Nepal and India. To Beal’s credit, she resists facile resolution; cultural dislocation may be transformative, but she also notes the gaps and incongruities.

In November 2007, the National Endowment for the Arts issued a report packed with data revealing that the “habit of regular reading” was on the decline. In the same report, evidence was marshaled to show “how powerfully reading transforms the lives of individuals.” These days, we seem more invested than ever in the idea that words on the page can change you and that stories might produce power surges lasting a lifetime. Testimonials abound in volumes with titles ranging from A Passion for Books and The Book That Changed My Life to Bound to Please and Leave Me Alone, I’m

Joe Ashby Porter has a knack for finding life’s small moments, gilding them with flights of fancy, then letting them drift away. Sometimes he writes viscerally, as in this description of a body’s decomposition: “[Grandpa] Guo dwindles to a specimen cicada husk boxed and buried near Wanda below the frost line.” And sometimes he writes opaquely, as when old lovers reconsider each other: “Resumption should be a bodily karaoke, ready (even still) to be carried away, if just as happy with the slow and steady, old sobriquets welling up, thigh across thigh, tasting.” All Aboard, Porter’s fourth volume of stories,