Looking at someone you find attractive—better yet, someone you hope also finds you attractive—your gaze might brush the floor before your eyes meet; while you shift from foot to foot, your hand may sweep a lock of hair behind your ear. This feels artless, an outer expression of an inner flush. On closer inspection, it’s clear your movement is pantomime, not instinct. You have been choreographed—by a beautiful actress on the screen, or by, say, a friend’s older sister, whose beauty is all the more amazing for its proximity: How could such glamour be in your kitchen, leaning on your linoleum

It’s perilous when the words spoken by a writer end up more well known than those he actually wrote. The line “I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad” has appeared in most articles about Robert Walser written since his death in 1956. The “here” is, supposedly, the Sanatorium of Appenzell in Herisau, Switzerland, and the hearer was, allegedly, Carl Seelig, whose recollected visits to the no-longer-writing writer, Walks with Walser, was just published by New Directions.

In 1936 Seelig, a literary admirer, began traveling to Herisau to see Walser, then fifty-eight years old. Together they

Every four years, American political journalists, who rarely interest themselves in spiritual matters outside of election cycles, act out their own sort of religious ritual: foretelling “the evangelical vote.” Think back to February 2016, after Donald Trump had won his large victory in the Republican primary in New Hampshire, but before South Carolina had voted. He was not supposed to win that state, because there are a lot of evangelicals there, and evangelicals, our soothsayers told us, did not like Donald Trump. They did not like him because he was Donald Trump, and we all know that story,

In February, 2009, the British medical journal Brain published an article on the intersection of health and politics titled “Hubris Syndrome: An Acquired Personality Disorder?” The authors were David Owen, the former British Foreign Secretary, who is also a physician and neuroscientist, and Jonathan Davidson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University, who has studied the mental health of politicians. They proposed the creation of a psychiatric disorder for leaders who exhibited, among other qualities, “impetuosity, a refusal to listen to or take advice and a particular

Like much of Beckett’s work, “Watt” is funny and bleak and also uncompromising in its indifference to such readerly comforts as plot and accessibility. The novel follows its title character as he goes to work as a domestic servant in the home of Mr. Knott. Combine “Watt” and “Knott” and you get “whatnot,” and for some readers, assuredly, “Watt” will never be more than that: two hundred and fifty pages of mannered prose, showy vocabulary (“ataraxy,” “conglutination,” “exiguity”), syllogisms, lists, and Gertrude Stein-like repetitions and variations.

But Beckett’s stylistic extravagance has a

The cagey narrator of Katie Kitamura’s new novel, A Separation, is an unnamed woman who has recently separated from her unfaithful husband, Christopher. He has asked her to keep the split a secret. When Christopher stops returning his mother’s phone calls while traveling in Greece, the narrator is enlisted to go find him, feeling she has no choice but to make the trip. She travels to the small village where he was staying and pretends to perform her wifely duties as she searches for her husband, all the while planning to ask for a long-overdue divorce. Even though Christopher exists only as a

Just when you’re about to do a proper job as critic, assessing Jeff VanderMeer’s latest and looking at his previous, considering, too, his worldwide success and the good it’s done for science fiction generally—just when you’re about to get serious, his new novel, Borne, hits you with the likes of this:

We didn’t see the intruders at first because they were seething up from the underground. . . . But soon enough from our vantage on the roof, looking down to the factory floor through a couple of loose slats, I saw who it was: more poisoned half-changed children.