The novels of acclaimed French writer Marie NDiaye are set in familiar spaces: domestic worlds, often within cities. Her protagonists are usually determined, upwardly mobile women in pursuit of stability. But NDiaye’s stories also press against the boundaries of realism. If, in the nineteenth-century realist novel, family and origin provide clues about the self, here, they show the point at which the self can unravel. The strangeness, pain, and horror of relationships are indexed by odd, fantastic events in NDiaye’s otherwise lifelike storylines. In her 2016 novel Ladivine, for instance, a

“We never know our partner as well as we think we do,” the psychotherapist Esther Perel writes in Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic (2006), a guide for couples weathering periods of sexual disconnection. Even after many years, she points out, your partner can be inscrutable, as hard as you try to convince yourself you know them—or, worse, that there’s nothing much to know. “The grand illusion of committed love is that we think our partners are ours,” Perel continues, whereas “in truth, their separateness is unassailable.”

Her new book, The State of Affairs: Rethinking

There are fifty-five thousand drawings in Frank Lloyd Wright’s archive. Even for an architect so famously aeonian and prolific—he worked ceaselessly from his early twenties until his death, in 1959, at ninety-one—this seems like a suspiciously high number. The inescapable conclusion is that Wright himself created only some fraction of these images. But then who drew the rest? It is often impossible to tell. Making a building is a complex undertaking, and architecture is by nature a sprawling, conjunctive practice. Wright worked with dozens of students, employees, consultants, and collaborators

We tend to think of The Odyssey as the adventure story of Odysseus’s troubled, decade-long journey home from the Trojan War, his path impeded by all manner of men and monsters and gods. And indeed it is full of action and adventure—Odysseus’s wily escape from the Cyclops, his seduction by (or of) the witch Circe, and his interviews with ghosts at the gates to the land of the dead are just a few examples. But as Daniel Mendelsohn, perhaps the most accessible contemporary ambassador of the classics, argues in his new book, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, Homer’s classic may be, more