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Daisy Johnson’s new novel dissolves the borders between dreams and reality, presenting a radical portrait of identity. Rather than a constructed and fixed self, one that is as distinct as it is static, identity is fluid, multivalent, and porous: a person never stays themselves for long.
Once or twice, if we’re lucky, we may come across a writer who changes our lives. For me, the greatest discovery of my reading life, and the biggest influence on my writing life, was a box of fantasy and science fiction books my father left behind when he moved out.
As she got older, anytime someone was thinking of leaving town, my grandmother would implore them to stay, reciting the refrain that has now become a family catchphrase: “Don’t go no place,” she’d say. Family is the place. Nobody understands this interpretation of the utopian ideal better than immigrant communities.
A good story may seem to transform experience into myth, but as Molly Aitken’s debut novel explores, it cannot expunge the realities of the past. Nor is the world of myth any good place actually to live.
Lina Wolff’s new story collection, translated by Saskia Vogel, addresses death with morbid humor and oddity—flings, murders, and a DIY porn channel—and leaves us to stave off death with morbid hopefulness.
Salesses has written a novel of doppelgängers that begins forging its own double, attempting to confront the vast problems of racial inequality both in its plot and in its meta-structure, asking if there might be a parallel world for our own, one where these injustices could be corrected—or if that, too, is pure fantasy.
Technology (whether we mean social networking, video conferencing, virtual reality, or even language itself) can be both perilous and liberating, an architect of intimacy and an architect of loneliness too.
Obsession, loss of innocence, grief, forgiveness, belonging. Readers of Livesey’s impressive oeuvre will recognize these recurring themes; each one of her novels animates different variations on these experiences. Her ninth novel, out today, explores them, too, via a seamless kaleidoscopic narrative and artful suspense that propels the story along.
Iris Martin Cohen’s new novel is a reflection, a condemnation, and a compassionate call to action; it is the story of how we can start to open our eyes to see better and do better.
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