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“What I want to read about these days is women who want things. Katherine Dunn’s posthumously released novel is the most appetite-driven book I’ve read in quite some time.”
If you have ever broken up with someone or been broken up with, you have likely experienced that unique quality of love: its archive. Laurie Colwin’s 1986 collection describes this lonely archive, its characters turning their love over in an occasion of happiness and sadness alike.
Stories in Dionne Irving’s new collection suggest that sometimes a person might wish to be an island, to slough off from the mainland and stake out a claim of space for themselves. Irving’s narrators insist that sometimes vows have run their course, and there’s no greater freedom than letting go.
Ling Ma’s stories seem to ask us to take a pause from thinking about both the future and the past, to settle down into the whirl of the montage, and maybe even enjoy it.
The story of the destruction of one world has on its other side the generation of something new. It may not be a world fit for the living, but it is still a world—a new one, at that.
In a fragmented world, what remains? Presence, Sheila Heti’s newest novel insists, in all its broken and halfhearted and odd forms. Being present, however halfheartedly, to people and to texts is one balm for this condition.
For the people of Lapvona, the fictional Middle Ages village of Ottessa Moshfegh’s new novel, religiosity is less an articulation of faith or devotion and more of narrative concern. The central questions of faith are simply questions of what everything adds up to.
In Elif Batuman’s new novel, Selin is trying to figure out how to narrate love, how to make it make narrative sense; on the way, she figures out what love and novels have to do with each other.
At its most fundamental level, Jennifer Egan’s new novel is about stories, about how humans are inclined to shape information into narrative.
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