“IT MAY BE THAT THE subconscious is really a committee,” Cormac McCarthy tells Oprah in their 2007 interview, a full eight years before he could have gotten the idea from Disney-Pixar’s Inside Out. “They may have meetings and say, ‘What do you think we should tell him? Should we tell him that? Nah, he’s not ready for that.’ . . . Sometimes the sense of the subconscious and its role in your life is just something you can’t ignore. It may have to do with the subconscious being older than language, and maybe it’s more comfortable creating little dramas than telling you things, but it has to

BORN DAVID CORNWELL in 1931, John le Carré was too young to go to war and thus too young to experience Britain’s patriotic struggle with Nazi Germany from inside the intelligence service, too young to have worked in alliance with the Soviet Union, and much too young to have been a university student in the 1930s, when many idealistic young Britons joined with the Communists because they were the staunchest opponents of fascism. He was sent to boarding school at the age of five, and it left him with a bitter feeling toward his country’s ruling institutions, even as he would remain thoroughly a

NOMINALLY, LYDIA MILLET’S TWELFTH NOVEL, Dinosaurs, takes its title from the birds that inhabit the Arizona desert in which the book is set. But it also refers to Millet’s protagonist Gil, a kind, aimless man in his mid-forties. Orphaned in early childhood, he inherited a fortune at age eighteen and, when we meet him, is both ashamed of being “disgustingly rich” and fixated on finding the single “best way to contribute.” He’s so terrified of doing wrong that he’s spent his adulthood doing little but clinging to an unhappy relationship, volunteering at a series of nonprofits, and yearning to be

“WE WONDER at our shifting capacities, keep / adding and striking skills / from the bottoms of our résumés / under constant revision / like the inscriptions on tombs,” Anna Moschovakis writes in her 2011 poetry collection You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake. E, the sometimes-narrator of Moschovakis’s new novel Participation, would likely feel at home in this “we”: she has three jobs, or, as she later corrects herself, “tall piles of tasks—paid, unpaid, underpaid—at every moment.” In one of capitalism’s many depraved ironies, these multiple tasks don’t multiply her income. Instead, the

WHEN BARBARA SMITH describes Toni Morrison’s Sula as an “exceedingly lesbian novel” in her pathbreaking essay “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” she stops just short of calling either of the book’s main characters the L word. Sula, which sumptuously tells the story of a pair of Black girls learning how to become Black women in a world that aims to constrain their desires, reveals the depths of intimacy available to women when they focus on cultivating relationships with each other rather than seeking communion with men. For Smith, a woman deriving pleasure for herself “functions much like

Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos is fundamentally about the human species and the promises and perils of human nature. Although Vonnegut published Galápagos fifteen years before scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer first proposed the idea of naming our current geological epoch the Anthropocene, the novel’s environmental parables become even more relevant as we experience the effects of humans acting as geological agents on the planet. 

Galápagos is able to tackle these topics successfully because it is grounded in science. The novel simultaneously employs Darwin’s theories of natural selection