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Chanukah has begun. Christmas will be here before you know it. And we’ve got four gift ideas for the readers on your list. Our book critic Christopher Merrill is at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Marco Werman speaks with him.

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A new book of stories from the Canadian writer Alice Munro is always
welcome, and Too Much Happiness delivers her customary blend of exactly
observed lives inflected by tragedy and redeemed by the gift of
knowledge. Thus a woodworker, who slips and breaks his ankle in the snow
and is saved by his wife, discovers a new side to her. A woman who
committed a terrible crime when she was a child realizes why she has
never loved. And a man with a large birthmark on his face, looking back
on his childhood, realizes that “[t]he life of those times took much of
its liveliness, its wit and folklore, as my mother may have known, from
pure viciousness.” But there is nothing vicious about Munro’s writings:
she seems to know everything.

Late in his life, the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz produced
two volumes of dreams, artfully constructed prose vignettes which turn
the seemingly mundane details of daily life into marvelous parables that
delight, instruct, and haunt. “In the Garden of Freedom,” he writes,
“whose flowers were watered with lovers’ tears, I promenaded around its
sundry parts, amidst the moans of passion and the cries of combat.” And
if he resolves “to forget both lovemaking and fighting” this book is
proof that he did not forget anything. Thank God.

If you’re looking for something different than the realistic fiction on
offer in many American magazines and literary journals this wide-ranging
anthology of the writers from the Continent is for you. These stories
and excerpts from new novels feature an array of narrative strategies
and styles, which owe more to Kafka and Beckett than Dickens, and what
the reader takes from them are not only the usual pleasures of
fiction-the twists and turns of plot, chance to inhabit other lives,
other ways of being-but new ways of thinking about how to tell a story.

David Margrave’s images breathe new life into Kafka’s hilarious story of
an elderly bachelor whose orderly existence is upended first by the
mysterious appearance of a pair of bouncing balls and then by his two
irrepressible assistants who keep disobeying him-an absurdist premise
that Kafka explores with such precision that by the end of the tale it
seems perfectly realistic. Kafkaesque, that is. A perfect story to read
after the last gift has been wrapped.