The madness of war: David Diop’s brutal and beautiful At Night All Blood Is Black
The novel, which won the 2021 Man Booker International Prize, questions where duty and friendship end and insanity begins.
Stolen goods: metafictional wheels within wheels abound in Jean Hanff Korelitz’s thriller The Plot
The novel is among a series of recent thrillers that focus on writers behaving badly.
Tales of Transgression: Joris-Karl Huysmans’s demonic inferno, Là-Bas
Huysmans shared his protagonist’s disgust with humanity and longed to create a new kind of literature.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 31: “Precious Bane” by Gerald Murnane
A Borgesian story about literary posterity and the fickleness of memory, from an Australian master.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 30: “Gazebo” by Raymond Carver
A powerful monument to what the short form is capable of from “the most influential writer of American short stories in the second half of the 20th century.”
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 29: “Abortion, A Love Story” by Nicole Flattery
Irish author Flattery’s novella-length story is an enthusiastic evisceration of the patriarchy and institutional pomposity.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 28: “The Secret Sharer” by Joseph Conrad
Conrad’s story is at once a version of a doppelgänger story and an examination of repressed psychology and moral ambiguity.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 26: “Safeword” by R.O. Kwon and “Scissors” by Kim Fu
Two stories about pleasure and pain interrogate the nature of trust and what we risk when we relinquish control.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 25: “Violations” by Catherine Lacey
“Violations” is a story that instructs its reader how to read it even as it is unfolding on the page.
31 Days of Stories 2021, Day 24: “The Americans” by Viet Thanh Nguyen
The interplay among the characters in Nguyen’s story dramatizes the prickly concerns that crop up in the face of cultural conflicts and commingled histories.