The protagonist of the linked short stories in Bryan Washington’s debut collection, Lot, does not give us his name—at least, not until we have earned this privilege. First, we have to let him usher us through Houston’s working-class neighborhoods and into the lives of queer people of color clinging to their jobs and homes as the city changes around them. The stories unfold in the confines of restaurant kitchens and cramped homes, places where the hard logic of economic precariousness can turn people into enemies just as easily as it can turn them into kin. In Washington’s portrait of the Houston

The Clinton Hill brownstone where Kathleen Alcott’s second novel, Infinite Home (2015), is largely set is about as far away from the Apollo program’s Lunar Module—Lem, in NASA-speak—as fictional territory can be. Edith, the elderly landlord of this neglected five-unit dream factory, hasn’t raised the rent in fourteen years and lives in closer communion with the neighborhood’s past than its multi-racial, gentrifying present; the tenants are eccentrics with maladies and psychic wounds that make it impossible for them to traffic in the world outside. One night, when Edith wanders disoriented into

In English, concision may generally be the best policy, but in the case of Spanish writer Enrique Vila-Matas’s new (or newly translated) metanovel, one might opt for the more laborious UK title—Mac and His Problem—over New Directions’ American rendering, Mac’s Problem. The latter really only goes in one direction, and it is clear early on that Mac indeed has a problem. Though we first meet him in the guise of a budding writer—a beginner, he calls himself, diligently apprenticing in his handsome Barcelona study—it quickly becomes apparent that our hero, a voracious reader who was a lawyer (or

In life, we tend to dislike those who “like the sound of their own voice.” And in literature, we dislike them too. We call what they’re doing “overwriting.” They pun, they hyperbolize, they use words like hyperbolize. Words, in general, carry them away. In a word-user, there is no vice more difficult to forgive. Of course, there are exceptions. For example, Shakespeare. William Faulkner is another one. Cormac McCarthy offers a living specimen, and in his case, the ornateness makes sense. In his books, people get scalped. A little alliteration seems warranted. How the writer Sam Lipsyte pulls

In his recent book New Dark Age, James Bridle describes the current internet era as one of draconian, top-down control. Blind belief in computation has led to a disastrous imbalance of power, networked technology is being weaponized for mass surveillance, and algorithmic governance is sapping political agency from citizens. Tim Maughan’s novel Infinite Detail takes up Bridle’s thesis by imagining its antithesis: What if the internet kill switch were flipped? Assuming networked technology is the primary enabler of our ongoing political nightmare, what would happen if it just—shut off? As it