THE RESISTERS by Gish Jen (Knopf). Too early in the year for a baseball novel? Even one by a celebrated literary writer? Well, then, how about a near-future fantasy that's brilliantly inventive but comfortable enough, slightly comic, even warming until you notice you're being burned? This is subtle stuff, and not at all preachy or hectoring, yet this future that we find ourselves in is distinctly dystopian. Likable people; a master pitcher in a secret, underground baseball league and her fully realized family—marginalized but not unduly oppressed, even middle-class, though definitions are not quite the same, now—and a story that proceeds smoothly at first, from one natural development to the next, to . . . you'll not foresee where, but you'll believe it. The column has overlooked some Gish Jen, but never again.

INTERIOR CHINATOWN by Charles Yu (Pantheon). And, wouldn't you know, then there's this guy, this same week? Another author who has been lavishly praised before, not by this column. Not quite so delicate, so subtle, but smart—not smart-alecky, intelligent at depth. And hilarious. And, in a somewhat different way but just as unmistakably, literary. In effortless command of a variety of ways of presenting events, people, process. This novel presents itself as shooting scripts (including the title, you may have noticed). People clearly seen and made vitally known to us, by no means only his central character, a professional actor who appears mostly as Generic Asian Man in TV cop shows. You'll be seeing both these names here again—probably not in the same week, next time.

HEATHCLIFF REDUX: A NOVELLA AND STORIES by Lily Tuck (Atlantic Monthly Press). And still more literary fiction, another not very big book, this one by an already established column favorite and National Book Award winner. It is, as always with Lily Tuck, sneakily powerful, even upsetting, though there's nothing physically violent in it. An earlier reviewer has said, with the sort of book-reviewer's aphorism that's crisp enough to be envied, that Tuck is “a genius with moments.” That's far from all she is, but yes, tons of them in a book that weighs ounces.

A DIVIDED LOYALTY: An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery by Charles Todd (Morrow). One might have skipped this one, trusting his followers to notice an ad or a review somewhere and run right out, but this twenty-second of this series seems even more than usually intricate—Scotland Yard politics is especially threatening, this time—and all the more (if that were possible) moving and satisfying

THE MUSEUM OF DESIRE: An Alex Delaware Novel by Jonathan Kellerman (Ballantine). This Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis police procedural is a compelling example of the ability of certain master writers to sustain a consistency of invention and execution over a long series—this one at number thirty-five, now. Contemporary Los Angeles, with sophisticated, neat psychological twists, and crude, messy blood.