The lies have it: Two new debut novels showcase unreliable narrators
Whereas Novack lets her narrator's duplicity bleed through in the way the book is structured, Lucy, the woman at the centre of Taff's novel, tells us she's lying right up front.
Black lives, white rage: Two new books re-examine the Bernie Goetz subway vigilante case
Both Thompson and Williams attempt to draw direct connections between the societal cleavages the Goetz case brought into stark relief and the current polarization of political sentiment in the U.S.
Raymond Chandler via Albert Camus: Some thoughts on James Sallis, who died in January at the age of eighty-one
"James Sallis writes in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, albeit via Albert Camus."
Hot for teacher: Jennette McCurdy’s debut novel, about a high-school student’s affair with her creative writing instructor, intends to provoke
McCurdy's method is predicated upon an ironic distance between Waldo's narration and the reader's ability to see through it.
A deal with the Devil: How a ninety-year-old novel from a Nobel Prize winner’s son maps onto our current political moment
Mann's novel closely mines the contradictions in his protagonist's character.
Clinging to the flotsam: James Sallis examines the classic era of paperback noir fiction
This is one of the things Sallis insists on: the idea that commercial fiction can contain insights every bit as profound as those in more high-minded literary novels.
21st century kitsch: Cultural critic W. David Marx examines the state of our art in his book Blank Space
Marx argues that the 21st century has been typified not by artistic innovation or renovation, but by a capitalistic retrenchment.
Sixteen books that helped put 2025 in perspective
What our literary output offers is not a vision of perfectibility but an attempt to reckon with our world in all its contradiction, ambiguity, and fractiousness.
A new(ish) hard SF novel mixes questions of ontology and the nature of memory with Lovcraftian cosmic horror
There Is No Antimemetics Division is not technically a new book: it originated as an online serial for the SCP Foundation.
Sexual healing: Bloomberg investigative journalist Ellen Huet’s book chronicles the rise and fall of OneTaste, a centre for “orgasmic meditation”
Huet is hesitant to reduce OneTaste to the simple category of a cult, notwithstanding the use of that word in her subtitle.