For a long time, Hrabal and Andrzejewski were the only practitioners of the sentence-long book I could find. Not many writers have had the nerve to go this route: you’re locked in, committed to ...

Thus begins Gautam Bhatia’s meticulously structured speculative fiction, The Sentence. Its gripping prologue ... is no flaw but the demand of this book. Nevertheless, as the story moves forward ...

His latest is “Life Sentence: The Brief and Tragic Career of Baltimore’s Deadliest Gang Leader.” I contacted him to ask what drew him to create this well-written and interesting book.

What made this sentence particularly “true”? It must in part have been the forthright use of the first person, its stout assertion of autobiography, undamming the reservoir of personal experience that ...