When published in Spanish…Martínez’s book bore a title that translates as “The Migrants Who Don’t Matter.” Changing that to “The Beast” may subtly shift the emphasis to the train and away from its reluctant passengers, but Martínez never wavers in his focus on the Salvadorans, Hondurans, Guatemalans and Nicaraguans who travel “without anyone but robbers and kidnappers even glancing in their direction.”

Zhu Wen's gift for plotting is brilliant. In his best stories, he appears to be telling you one compelling story while ultimately revealing an even better one embedded within.

...accepting the benefits of an informal economy—reputation and barter—while helping a small, distant elite build real wealth...The fate of journalism and music awaits every other industry, and every kind of job, unless this pattern is undone. As this century unfolds...More and more activities will be operated by software. Instead of Teamsters, there will be robotic trucks. Where there had once been miners, there will be mining robots. Instead of factories, there will be 3-D printers in every home. Experimental robots have already outperformed many a white-collar worker, including the legal researcher, the pharmacist and the scientific investigator. All forms of automation ultimately rely on data that come from people, however. There is no magical “artificial intelligence.” When a big, remote computer translates a document from English to Spanish, for instance, it doesn’t understand what it is doing. It is only mashing up earlier translations created by real people, who have been forgotten because of the theater of the Internet. There are always real people behind the curtain. The rise of inequality isn’t because of people not being needed—more precisely, it’s because of an illusion that they aren’t even there.

Haruki Murakami has signed a deal for the English translation of “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage”...[it] sold over a million copies in just over a week...in Japan...