Unlike her character Sibylla, Helen DeWitt did successfully complete her degree. She won the prestigious Ireland Prize for young classicists and might have been able to make a career in the academy. Oxford University Press wanted to publish her dissertation. But DeWitt decided to leave. She didn’t leave, or didn’t only leave, because Oxford failed to live up to her fantastic stan­dards. She also left because she discovered an alternative to the aca­demic pursuit. In graduate school, she recalls, “a British Jew introduced me to Kurosawa and Sergio Leone and Dennis Potter, to the power of imaginary

Stephanie LaCava’s second novel, I Fear My Pain Interests You, opens with a strange epigraph: “Cows are not sentient beings.” The quote is attributed to “Reddit”—not a specific person on Reddit, but the platform itself, the amorphous, faceless chorus of fifty-two million very opinionated daily active users. It’s an enigmatic piece of front matter for an enigmatic story, and one that successfully primes the reader to enter the world of LaCava’s protagonist, Margot Highsmith, who, in a way, lacks sentience of her own.   

Margot—an actress, early twenties, privileged, and very thin—is an iteration

MUST A NOVEL ENGAGE with contemporary life? One still finds the call, as tenacious as cliché, for novels that “speak to the moment we are in,” “work out society,” or otherwise “interpret the now,” insisted upon regularly in marketing copy and pieces of criticism, not to mention on Twitter. A better question to ask is whether a novel can do anything but react to—or reflect—contemporary life. This one is characteristic of a certain kind of Marxist criticism, which seems at times to make a point of noting that novels engage with the “now” regardless of their authors’, or readers’, intentions. And

“Reality is not a given: it has to be continually sought out, held—I am tempted to say salvaged,” John Berger writes in his 1983 essay “The Production of the World.” “Reality is inimical to those with power.” 

There’s a Berger short story, published in the New Yorker in 2001, called “Woven, Sir” that reminds me, in a way, of this. It’s a story in which Berger’s adult narrator describes being in Madrid, waiting for a friend at the Ritz Hotel (with classic Berger observations around the sensual realities of class and wealth, as in his impression, in the hotel, of “the deafness of money . . .

The narrator of Jordan Castro’s debut novel, The Novelist, is a writer and a recovering heroin addict. Newly sober, he feels as if he’s seeing the world for the first time, and all the ordinary things he overlooked as an active addict are now taking on a surreal quality—the way the light plays on the bedroom wall alone seems to be too much. He is trying to write a novel about his once-humorous, pathetic life as an addict, except he is now driven by a more common addiction: checking Gmail and scrolling through Twitter. Sobriety gives him a new existence, but the need to feel a dopamine rush

A FRIEND OF MINE from what feels like a lifetime ago once introduced me to her uncle during dinner at her mom’s house. That he was avuncular in all the classic ways—huge, meek, seemed like he had a life defined by extreme silence—was mostly unremarkable, but what lingered from our meeting was his decision to forcibly share his two clearest, greatest fantasies with a table largely made up of children. The first, he said, extending a finger over some entreé meat, was to meet supermodel Christie Brinkley before he faced the grave. The other—up went another finger, eyes and heart fat with conviction—was