"San Remo Drive" grabs and holds our attention -- and our sympathy -- because Epstein allows us to glimpse Hollywood in its golden age through the eyes of someone who knows it firsthand, and he populates the landscape with men, women and children whose fears, yearnings and failings are perfectly credible and wholly compelling. Epstein is a master storyteller at the height of his powers, and his book is a worthy addition to the literature of Los Angeles in general and Hollywood in particular.

-- Jonathan Kirsch

*The Scheme for Full Employment

A Novel

Magnus Mills

Picador: 204 pp., $19

Magnus Mills is a slave driver. Find yourself in one of his novels, and chances are you'd either be a fence builder, an odd jobber, an excavator -- or, in his latest, "The Scheme for Full Employment," a delivery van driver, shuttling spare parts from one depot to another. Less a novelist than a writer of parables, Mills writes fictions that are satiric, didactic, subtle and blatant all at once. His characters have seemingly fallen out of the sky and landed in a world so surreal yet so completely realized that they, and perhaps you, will never once question its strangeness, and while Mills' stories may provide a fair wage for the reader -- humor, provocation, unpredictability and the like -- they come with a hidden cost. But that's in the fine print; for now, The Scheme's the thing.

"The Scheme for Full Employment" contains not only the recognizable small dramas of the workplace but also the larger interplay among the heavyweights of modern labor. It's the Keynesians versus the Von Hayeks, the Fords versus the UAWs, the Stakhanovites versus the shirkers. The lessons that arise may seem inadvertent, as if Mills might have stubbed his toe in the telling, but there's more art and intention in these pages than first meets the eye.

-- Thomas Curwen

*Shroud

A Novel

John Banville

Alfred A. Knopf: 264 pp., $25

Of a certain kind of soprano, it is said in tones of reverence tinged with pity that she never draws attention to her voice but always subordinates it to the requirements of the score. The tinge of pity comes from the fact that such a soprano is always of the second rank. One can no more ask a Wagnerian prima diva like Jane Eaglen not to draw attention to her voice than one can ask Shaquille O'Neal not to draw attention to his size.