•  Critics praised Elizabeth McCracken’s first novel, The Giant’s House, which was published in 1997. The plot concerns interesting characters in circumstances as innovative as they are in this story: a lonely librarian in a small town falls in love with a boy fourteen years younger than she and stays true to him as he grows to nearly nine feet tall.

•  The loose border between reality and fantasy that McCracken flirts with in this story is pushed further in Michael Paterniti’s Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip across America with Einstein’s Brain (2000). Paterniti’s book chronicles an actual journey across the country in a Buick Skylark, with the brain of Albert Einstein, which was removed from Einstein’s body upon his death in 1955, and the aged pathologist...