Falling Man. By Don DeLillo

So far we have had post-September 11 novels from John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and more. But the writer who seemed best equipped to respond to our paranoid moment, whose September 11 novel seemed most necessary, was Don DeLillo. Mr. DeLillo, more than any other novelist, has always worked at the intersection of public terror and private fear. His novels explore the way disaster, mediated through television, becomes experience: the Kennedy assassination in "Libra," the "airborne toxic event" in "White Noise," the atom bomb in "Underworld."

As Adam Kirsh relates in the New York Sun, "'Falling Man,' offers neither the sprawling historical canvas of "Underworld," nor the thesis-driven postmodernism of "Libra" and "Mao II." Instead, like Mr. DeLillo's last two novels — 'Cosmopolis' and 'The Body Artist,' neither very well received — the new book is small-scale and subdued, at times even a bit airless." Read the full article here.

The Buried Book. By David Damrosch

There's no better illustration of the fragility and the power of literature than the history of "The Epic of Gilgamesh," the oldest known literary work, composed in Babylonia more than 3,000 years ago. About 400 years later, after one of the ruthless, bloody sieges typical of that time, the epic was buried in the ruins of a Mesopotamian palace. There it lay, utterly forgotten along with the name of the king who once reigned in that palace, until a British archaeologist and his Iraqi assistant unearthed it not far from the modern city of Mosul in 1840. David Damrosch's artful, engrossing new history, "The Buried Book," relates how "The Epic of Gilgamesh" was lost and found -- or rather how it was found and lost, since he tells the story backward, from the present to the past, in an archaeological fashion. It's a risky narrative gambit, and Damrosch is gifted enough to pull it off. Read the full story here.

On Chesil Beach. Ian McEwan

If you stroll along the "infinite shingle" of Chesil Beach in Dorset, as Ian McEwan did while composing his new novel, you will find that millennia of tides and winds have "graded the size of pebbles" along its 18-mile length, "with the bigger stones at the eastern end". The writer went to check this out, and felt - as he weighed the pebbles in his palms - that it was true. Already, critics have lauded On Chesil Beach as a major achievement from a painstaking micro-historian of the inner life. Read the full story here.