It’s late 2009 and Jen, our heroine, has fallen on hard-ish times: She has been fired from her job as communications officer at a Madoff-scuttled family foundation, where she’s been cozily ignoring her true calling (art?) since graduating from college. When she gets bored of rattling around the cardboardy apartment that she shares with her public-schoolteacher husband, Jim, in an inadequately gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood they call Not Ditmas Park, she accepts an assignment from her college friend Pam to paint some portraits. She then allows her work to be incorporated, gratis, into an upcoming installation/performance by Pam, who is an

Powered by Yiddish, neologisms, ten-dollar words, and jive talk, Oreo, Fran Ross’s scabrous, shrewd satire of race, religion, and sex that’s nested within a reimagining of Theseus’s odyssey, often threatens to jump out of the reader’s hands with its irrepressible logophilia. This is a novel that refuses to be categorized or tamed in any way, with the first of its many provocations signaled by its title—which is the nickname of its young protagonist, née Christine Schwartz, the daughter of a black mother and a white Jewish father. Oreo was originally published in 1974 to little notice. The neglect was likely

Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel asks for a kind of immersion at odds with the practices of contemporary attention-deficit culture. A Little Life is epic in scope, riveting on every page, and frequently stomach-churning in its explorations of pain and loss. The novel takes up the stories of four college roommates, all of them young men of exceptional drive, talent, and personal attraction, as they live through three decades following their graduation at some unspecified point early in the twenty-first century. Jude and Willem are orphaned, JB and Malcolm come from loving families, but each one of the four is in

Long before college students on American or British campuses began signing up for courses in postcolonial literature, there were people from the colonies present in the imperial cities. In London Calling (2003), Sukhdev Sandhu writes that in 1900, during the “heyday of an empire often assumed to have been a foreign affair . . . black and Asian people were common sights in London: peddling religious tracts in White-chapel; walking, law books in hand, to the Inns of Court where they were students; operating on sick patients at teaching hospitals; collecting fares on the city’s omnibuses; performing as nigger minstrels

A novel is not designed to be read in one sitting. A reader finds herself in different moods, and different chairs, over the course of a novel; its pages become saturated with meals and conversations and days good and bad. A short story is read all at once, and alone. It might get knitted into life if it is reread many times over the years, but it always arrives complete, a thing apart and sufficient unto itself, like an asteroid. It is at once smaller and more vulnerable than a novel, and stranger and stiffer, somehow more independent. It doesn’t

Lucia Berlin was born November 12, 1936, and she died on November 12 sixty-eight years later, which suggests a tidiness to her time on this earth that her time on this earth certainly did not exhibit. She lived in Alaska, Chile, Mexico, and the American Southwest, loved her sister and loathed her mother, had severe scoliosis and a very large drinking problem. She was forever getting married to cads or addicts and had four sons whom she pretty much raised herself, supporting them through a series of crummy jobs—switchboard operator, ER attendant, cleaning woman. From the ’70s through the ’90s,

The first time I read The Laughing Monsters, I found it easy to love line by line—Denis Johnson’s prose, as always, is incandescent—but as scenes and chapters piled up I struggled to sustain a sense, however provisional, of what it was actually about, beyond the obvious: that the narrator is a corrupt intelligence operative named Roland Nair who has returned to Sierra Leone after eleven years’ absence to hook up with an old friend and try to make some money, as they did once before. There’s a lot of setup and backstory, several plots (that is, conspiracies) running alongside one

Your soul mate is emotionally unavailable. He’s a bastard! He’s a narcissist. (So are you.) He’s great in bed, but he’s a workaholic. He’s an alcoholic. He’s a junkie. In strictly mechanical terms, your apartment is literally too small to have sex in. Let’s not talk about the size of your heart. The plight of the homeless does not move you. You personally haven’t called home in years. You have no shoulder to lean on; all your “friends” want to eat you alive. You’ve been forsaken by humanity. You’re a New Yorker.

“I’ve written a number of essays the past few years,” Dodie Bellamy writes in her new book, When the Sick Rule the World, “and I keep vowing to quit.” We know her essay-quitting hasn’t been going well, not only because we’re reading about it in a Dodie Bellamy essay, but also because these words, which originally appeared in the 2008 chapbook Barf Manifesto, are now nestled in a new collection alongside thirteen other essays, most of which have been written in the years since.