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

In 1979, Werner Herzog made good on a promise to eat his shoe. A few years earlier, Errol Morris, a protégé of Herzog’s in Berkeley, California, had been struggling to finish his first film. Herzog promised that if Morris got it done, he’d consume some footwear. Morris ultimately delivered Gates of Heaven, the documentary about the pet-cemetery business that launched his career; Herzog, true to his word, entered the kitchen with a pair of leather boots. He stuffed whole heads of garlic into the toes, added liberal doses of hot sauce, and tossed the concoction into a pot along with heaps of

Andre Agassi’s Open was a groundbreaking memoir for a tennis player when it came out in 2009. The writing had verve and pop, as Agassi (and ghostwriter J. R. Moehringer) opted to tell his odyssey in the present tense, as if reliving every drama. And the confessionals along the way felt truly revealing. Agassi presented himself as a lost man: “I open my eyes and don’t know where I am or who I am,” reads the first line, bringing to mind a tennis-pro Gregor Samsa. We follow him from an intimate vantage point: crying in the shower, enduring militant training sessions with his father, dallying with

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

In the first chapter of Eileen Myles’s Afterglow (a dog memoir), we learn that the author’s pit bull Rosie, whom Myles chose in 1990 from a street litter and cared for until her death sixteen years later, was not always pleased with her owner. Leaving the apartment for the dog run, Myles finds a letter from a “dog lawyer,” who is seeking to file a lawsuit against Myles for crimes committed against Rosie. A reader might ask: Is this letter real, a neighbor’s prank, a figment of Myles’s fertile imagination? But these are the kinds of distinctions that Myles’s shape-shifting narrative obliterates