To understand Robert Coles’s two latest books, it helps to have seen his writing chair. Comfortable and unassuming, it sits with a blanket draped over it in the study of the three-story house in Concord, Massachusetts, where he and his late wife, Jane, raised their three boys.

In awarding the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature to Mario Vargas Llosa in October, the Swedish Academy cited the Peruvian novelist’s “cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” The Common Review approached four critics and scholars and asked each to offer brief reflections on his or her favorite Vargas Llosa book.

Dubravka Ugrešić is the most prominent writer to emerge from the former Yugoslavia in recent times. Though she has written movingly, in novels and essays, about the wars that ripped apart that country and the painful healing processes that have been in place since the end of the conflicts, it would be a mistake to see Ugrešić as a writer defined only by bloodbath in the Balkans.

In early 2009 the Texas Board of Education met to vote on whether the “strengths and weaknesses” of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution must be taught in the classroom. On the surface, this seems reasonable: assessing the strengths and weaknesses of just about anything is usually prudent. But in this context, “strengths and weaknesses” was a disguised attack on the scientific consensus behind Darwin’s theory, a back door through which creationism might creep into the state’s science classes.

“Besides reading, there was no place,” declares Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. For most of its history, Russia has been a place where books have seemed more real, carried more authority, than the “real” world. And, from Tsar Nikolai I’s self-assignation as Pushkin’s personal censor, to Stalin’s 2 a.m. phone call to Boris Pasternak to ask if he considered Osip Mandelstam a “master,” Russian rulers have certainly acted as if they were. Given the perennial drone about the death of literature, no wonder so many non-Russian readers continue drawing close to the Russian classics. Of these readers, Elif Batuman—a recent Stanford PhD who writes for n+1, Harper’s Magazine, and the New Yorker—is the...

In the memorable words of those other ‘60s hangovers, the Grateful Dead, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” There have been few stranger trips than the intellectual odyssey undertaken by some of the Dead’s contemporaries, as chronicled by Richard Wolin in The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s.

In many of my classes at Illinois State University, I’ve been setting aside time to ask the following questions of my students: How many works by US Latino or Latina writers have you encountered in your classes so far? Who are the authors? I’ve seen striking patterns in the students’ answers. Most of them come up with zero to two writers and works. I don’t take this outcome as a reflection on the students themselves. They often express curiosity to learn more, and students who volunteer personal identification as Latino give the same answers as everyone else. Instead, I consider their answers to give a working portrait of what is and isn’t getting attention in schools.

Gianni Vattimo’s book-length essay, The Responsibility of the Philosopher, first published in 2000 in Italian, is a kind of apologia for a philosophical life that has always been, to say the least, exposed to controversy. Vattimo’s youthful Catholicism was shattered by an early encounter with Friedrich Nietzsche, and the prospect of a “transvaluation of values” in the wake of the “death of God” turned him into a passionate campaigner against the Catholic hierarchy and the entire bourgeois social order. In 1968 (as he recalls in a brief but luminous autobiography, Not Being God, published in English in 2009) he felt himself morphing from romantic anticapitalist into revolutionary Maoist,...