THERE’S A PHOTOGRAPH of the writer Sigrid Nunez as a young woman, sometime in her mid-twenties. It is 1977 and she has graduated with an MFA from Barnard, having studied under Elizabeth Hardwick. In the picture, Nunez is quite literally radiant—her gleaming teal top echoes the light bouncing off her high cheekbones. 

On her left sits Susan Sontag, who is in her mid-forties. Wearing a black vest over a white dress shirt, Sontag leans slightly backward, her right hand grasping her left shoulder. Nunez tilts forward, long black hair framing her open, beaming face. Both women are smiling—their

THE CRITIC Ian Penman’s Fassbinder Thousands of Mirrors is a work of biographical criticism with strong views on the genre’s pitfalls and limitations. Right at the outset, he pronounces “the absolute impossibility of summing up” his subject, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and promises that this auteur monograph will not stoop to “plot outline and capsule description.” He questions the very point of “biography or overview or memorial or accounting in this era of Wikipedia and Twitter and all the other just-a-click-away info blocs and image banks.” And he bemoans the “dulling effect of canonization,”

THE DUBLIN-BORN NOVELIST PAUL MURRAY, who entered adulthood during Ireland’s rapid modernization in the 1990s, writes fiction about the problems that modernity everywhere has failed to solve. His characters come up against cruelty and abuse, inequality, grief, terrible loneliness, death—but generally their problems boil down to one of two sources, their families or their money. Murray’s 2010 boarding school–set bestseller, Skippy Dies—with its fucked-up children of sick or divorcing parents, its neatly bidirectional line between the traumas of childhood and the disappointments of adulthood—tilts

LORRIE MOORE’S NEW NOVEL STARTS TWICE. The first chapter is a letter from one sister to another, an old one, probably, because who writes letters anymore and I don’t even know what a “desk cartonnier” is but it sounds old. I can’t quite place the year or state but the period and region are clear: the Reconstruction South. “I have also sent Harry some old rebel coins for pounding into cufflinks,” our narrator, an innkeeper named Elizabeth, writes, as if to say, There will be no Confederate relics in my lodge. Canadian coins, oddly enough, circulate, but one senses that Elizabeth is speaking of

ONE STURDY WAY TO UNDERSTAND WRITER and director Henry Bean is as a specialist in the study of extremely bad behavior. His best subjects are the worst: self-hating havoc-wreakers, or the “I Suffered Complicated Trauma and Now the World Has to Deal With It” type. Populating his catalogue of asshole picaresques—rich with vicious couplings, drunken confrontations, alfresco autoeroticism—are a secretly Jewish neo-Nazi played by a skinhead Ryan Gosling (The Believer, 2001), a sledgehammer-and-baseball-bat-wielding vandal (Noise, 2007), a sexy serial murderess (Basic Instinct 2, 2006), and the

WHEN WE FIRST MEET HER, Alex is adrift—literally at sea, floating perilously farther away from shore. “What would they see if they looked at Alex?” she wonders, gazing on the rest of the beachgoers. “In the water, she was just like everyone else.” 

At first glance, Alex appears like any other young woman enjoying a day at the beach, her “thin brown hair cut at her shoulders.” Alex had learned early on “that she was not beautiful enough to model,” but was “tall enough and skinny enough that people often assumed she was more beautiful than she was. A good trick.” At twenty-two, she is still