Twenty years ago, Nigella Lawson, at the time a freelance op-ed columnist and sometime book reviewer, sat down for a revelatory working lunch. Her husband had suggested that Lawson, a former London restaurant critic, write a food book, but even as she discussed her enthusiasm for the subject with her agent, she expressed vehement opposition to putting it between covers. She felt she would be “looked down on” and seen as “the little woman,” as she recently put it in an interview. Whereupon her agent, as great agents have been known to do, pronounced his certainty about this marriage of author

In 2006, the late teacher, critic, and blogger Mark Fisher contributed an essay called “Gothic Oedipus: Subjectivity and Capitalism in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins” to ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies. Fisher routes his discussion of Batman Begins around the gothic, noir, Lacan’s concept of the Symbolic Father, and a 2001 interview with Alain Badiou, all of which are funneled into the concept of “capitalist realism,” Fisher’s best-known idea and the title of his 2009 book.

Capitalist realism has become an effective and portable idea because it confirms that capitalism can also

The apartment is a steal, but it has idiosyncrasies: it’s on the top floor of a four-story office building located on a traffic island; the rooms shake and the windows rattle as buses, trains, and trucks trundle past. It is 1970s Tokyo, and the unnamed narrator of Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light, a woman, newly separated from her husband, a single mother—the three in conjunction, she is now routinely reminded, define her particular status—no longer possesses an “ordinary” life. This home may be unusual, but it’s hers, and, on the plus side, there are windows on all sides and a red floor that

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body follows a single, unemployed young black woman (Tambudzai), as she attempts to escape the entangled forces of neocolonialism, patriarchy, poverty, and history’s ever-present effect on daily life in modern-day Zimbabwe. Tambu, who also appeared in Dangarembga’s previous books, Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not, is determined to create a better life for herself though she is discouraged at every turn. At the start of the book, we find Tambu in a run-down hostel in Harare, having recently left her job as a copywriter at an advertising agency. She

It’s probably Elaine Pagels’s fault I’m a Christian, if I am. When I was in college, one of my professors quoted the Gospel of Thomas in class. I don’t remember which passage he recited, but I remember that it sounded nothing like the gospels I had grown up with. If anything, given my limited repertoire at that time, it reminded me of Kafka or Beckett—terse, enigmatic, wry, gnawing at the edges of the mystical. I lit up like a pinball machine. I needed to hear more. One thing puzzled me: I hadn’t been the most diligent or devout catechumen, but I knew the Bible contained no Gospel of Thomas.