The Poison That Fascinates by Jennifer Clement

Ever since the days of ancient Greece, male imagination has connected women with the power to destroy someone by looking at them; summed up in the idea of the evil eye, and in the Greek verb baskaino, "I bewitch, malign or envy", from which came Latin fascinare and our word "fascinate". Greeks imagined that rays came out of the eye as well as into it (Aristotle thought that a woman who looked into a mirror while menstruating coated its surface with blood), and the evil eye was the gorgon's eye, and therefore female. Witches, and the snake called the basilisk, could turn you to stone or poison by meeting your eyes. The related Latin word fascinum meant both "witchcraft" and "a charm against the evil eye". Since the evil eye was predominantly female, this charm was shaped like a phallus. Our word "fascination", therefore, brings dark echoes into the battle of the sexes, and Jennifer Clement's highly original new novel, which turns on women murderers, uses them all to powerful effect. "Woman, divine woman," runs the song by the Mexican singer Augustin Lara from which the title is taken. "You have the poison that fascinates in your eyes." Read the full review here.

Betrayal by Eric Shanower

For an event as thoroughly chronicled as it is, the Trojan War is still relatively mysterious: There's no extant ancient document that presents its entire narrative. The war may or may not have actually taken place, in fact; from the judgment of Paris to the Trojan Horse, it's only known to us through legends stacked atop legends, beginning with Homer's "Iliad" and continuing through the movie "Troy" and beyond. So the classification on the spine of "Age of Bronze: Betrayal Part 1," the third and most recent collection of Eric Shanower's roughly thrice-annual black-and-white comic book, is "Historical Fiction/Mythology." That's a clever contradiction: Is it a recounting of something that didn't happen, or an invention to dramatize something that did? Read the review here.

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Bad reviews are often a lot more fun than good reviews. Obsolute pannings are a joy. According to The New York Times, which in 2006 sent a questionnaire to writers, editors, and critics, a short story collection by Denis Johnson titled Jesus’ Son is regarded by some as the best American book of the past 25 years. He is often called “a writer’s writer,” with the implication that this is far better than being a reader’s writer. But for The Atlantic's B.R. Myers Johnson's latest "Tree of Smoke" is astonishingly bad.

Diary of a Bad Year by JM Coetzee

Senor C is a South African author living in exile in Australia with a number of award winning novels to his name. He is now later in age and working on a collection of essays on his opinions. Rather like the author himself. Diary of a Bad Year sees Booker award winner JM Coetzee blur the lines between fact and fiction. For more on this new novel go here.

Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom

In “Lost Paradise,” Cees Nooteboom, a cerebral, experimental writer renowned in his native Netherlands (indeed throughout Europe) and consistently on the short list of Nobel Prize candidates, uses earthbound notions of hell and paradise, a few lines from Milton and an angel or two to construct a story of two people who meet at a literary festival in Perth, then again years later across a massage table at a mountain spa. Along the way, he brazenly explores notions of reinvention, healing, loss and the divine. For the full review go here

The Death of Socrates by Emily Watson

According to Emily Wilson in The Death of Socrates, we may have been led astray as to the true nature and the exact reasons for of the demise of the great Greek philospher. Plato’s is the accepted account; but we rarely hear Xenophon’s version of Socrates, who appears as a dull bore, spouting inane advice about moderation and self-control. Wilson also relates the Socrates of Aristophanes, where the philospher's ideas are skewered in the play The Clouds. The Death of Socrates recasts the death and ilfe of Socrates in a breezy and easy to read biography. For the full review go here.