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Olga Tokarczuk’s newly translated novel has been marketed as a murder mystery, albeit a strange one. It is that, partly, but underneath the whodunit is another novel: one about how our obsession with usefulness leads to greed, and the devastating impact of both on the environment.
The visibility or invisibility of a city’s parts is always in flux, but this year it was dizzying. In March and April, Boston felt like a ghost town—its trains, streets, and office buildings emptied. The students disappeared, and so did my neighbor, Gary, who didn’t have a home to hide in.
Schweblin’s voyeuristic robots and continuously shifting perspective guides us through an extended meditation on personal agency that is both bleeding edge and timeless: when do we defend and when do we willfully forfeit our autonomy? How is it taken from us and how do we erase it from others?
Best known for being a novelist, Muriel Spark was also a writer of short stories, many of which were ghostly. In her ghost stories, more often than not, Spark tests the old tropes by giving them a firm twist.
The stories in Schwartz’s new collection offer us an invitation to the unknown in ourselves and in the world. Turn to the impossible, they tell us, and explore it. We cannot help but do so since, after all, the impossible is going to show up if we’re ready or not.
Olga Tokarczuk’s most recent book is filled with themes for this stationary time—the longing not just for travel, but for immortality through movement, through time or space, accompanied by a fascination with our fellow travelers.
Joan Lindsay’s historical novel is about the transformations that take place after trauma, and how trauma is distorted when pressed into the molds of different class experiences, representing the final shapes we are allowed to assume.
A master of suspense, Daphne du Maurier’s highest skill lies in finding the latent dread in mundane domestic moments.
Carson’s novel is driven by unlatching being: her protagonist’s narration progresses from the self-absorption of childhood through adolescence and into the comparative wisdom of young adulthood. Carson shows this journey primarily through changes in the way that the outside world, and those who live in it, are observed.
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