Not what they seem: P.J. Vernon and Carrie Jenkins deliver queer thrillers with very different tones and approaches
A breezy, plot-driven book and an abstruse, philosophically dense ontological mystery provide different pleasures for readers.
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.
“I try to avoid labels”: Jeff VanderMeer on his new novel, ecological disaster, and why he won’t run for public office
Nominally a hardboiled noir, Hummingbird Salamander is also a cri de coeur about our current ecological crisis.
No future, or, the submerged punk ethos of Susan Sanford Blades’s Fake It So Real
In these tales of mothers, daughters, fathers, and lovers, punk is more attitudinal than aural or political.
Novelist Kim Echlin ventures into dark territory in Speak, Silence, a Bosnia-set novel about rape as a war crime
“For 2,000 years or more, women in literature have been represented as the spoils of war,” says Echlin about one impression she wanted to correct by writing this novel.
What’s in a name? Alexandra Andrews’s debut investigates literary fame and duplicity
Who Is Maud Dixon? is about ambition, identity, and the malleable nature of personality.
The anxiety of influencers: Ellery Lloyd’s Instagram mommy thriller People Like Her
The twisty, fast-paced debut effectively skewers online culture while telling a tense story about a family threatened from within and without.
Debut novelist Rebecca Watson reckons with how form can be used to reflect the realities of contemporary society
little scratch acts as a kind of bridge between Modernism and our current culture of distraction.