Internationally celebrated Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai has been heralded by Susan Sontag as the Hungarian master of the apocalypse and compared favorably to Gogol by W. G. Sebald. A new work by Krasznahorkai is always an event, and The Manhattan Project is no less. As part of Krasznahorkai s fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, he has been working on a novella inspired by a reading of Moby-Dick. Yet, as he follows in Herman Melville s footsteps, a second book alongside the original novella took...