At the end of June, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had hit a new level: two billion monthly active users. That number, the company’s preferred ‘metric’ when measuring its own size, means two billion different people used Facebook in the preceding month. It is hard to grasp just how extraordinary that is. Bear in mind that thefacebook—its original name—was launched exclusively for Harvard students in 2004. No human enterprise, no new technology or utility or service, has ever been adopted so widely so quickly. The speed of uptake far exceeds that of the internet itself, let alone ancient technologies such

It’s fair to say that Samantha Hunt doesn’t care much for straightforward realism. The protagonist of her first novel, The Seas (2004), is a young woman living in an isolated coastal town who’s convinced that she’s a mermaid. The Invention of Everything Else (2008) is set during the waning years of Nikola Tesla’s life, but includes a subplot wherein one of the supporting characters may have traveled through time. And her most recent novel, Mr. Splitfoot (2016), abounds with ghosts both literal and metaphorical.

Peter Handke is an acclaimed and prolific author of novels, plays, essays, and poems. A cultural icon of postwar Germany and Austria, he garnered an early reputation as a provocateur with works like Offending the Audience (1966) and Self-Accusation (1966). Handke was internationally acclaimed as a gifted prose stylist, with ruminative, extended sentences that had what John Updike called a “knifelike clarity of evocation.” Later in his career, Handke became embroiled in controversy as he became an outspoken supporter of Serbia during the Yugoslav wars, downplayed the fact that Serbian paramilitaries committed genocide during the conflict, and spoke at the

Now that we’re in the midst of accelerating climate change, runaway consumerism, and the rise of Donald J. Trump, approaches to fiction that appeared relevant a decade ago are in the process of being rendered escapist, if not downright quaint. At first glance, Barbara Browning’s The Gift, with its focus on performance art and the relationship of creative people to the elements of their own existence and physicality, might appear too focused on arcane matters to speak to our moment. But this novel, it soon becomes clear, is deeply relevant and timely, in part because the underlying “gift” of the

In September of last year, two months before the presidential election, then-candidate Donald Trump appeared on NBC’s Tonight Show. In what felt like one of the grossest media moments of our recent era—and let’s face it, the competition is stiff—host Jimmy Fallon asked his guest whether it would be OK to do something “not presidential” with him. “Can I mess your hair up?” Fallon proposed, puppyish and wide-eyed. Trump, pantomiming good-natured reluctance, let the host reach over and muss his thin, gingery strands, setting that precarious hair soufflé askew and earning a big hand from the audience. “Donald Trump, everybody!”

“Sometimes I wonder how I’d tell this if I didn’t have so many books rattling around inside me,” says Cat, the narrator of Julie Buntin’s riveting, assured debut novel Marlena. For Cat, a librarian and avid reader, storytelling is crucial, and she struggles to recount a tragedy from “a period of [her] life so brief, it was over almost as soon as it started.” Within the first few pages of the novel we learn that Cat’s best friend Marlena died, “suffocat[ing] in less than six inches of ice-splintered river,” when the girls were teenagers. Cat has never believed that what

Who can begrudge us foreigners our attraction to Los Angeles—its sprawling circuitry of wealth and poverty, beauty and damnation, innocence and experience? With its palm-screened boulevards, model-thronged beaches, and movie-star aura, LA seems faintly make-believe, yet we know that it is also a place of real crime, cults, and carbon emissions. In The Burning Ground, Adam O’Riordan’s debut collection of stories, the city is primarily a place of loneliness, ennui, and drift. An aging British painter escapes to California following the disintegration of a love affair; a divorced father drags his teenage son on an ill-advised hunting trip; a widower