Ling Ma’s debut novel, Severance, toggles between a novel about work, in which its protagonist carries out soul-sucking tasks to make more and more money (coerced by the structural requirements of capitalism), and a novel about a cult, in which its protagonist joins a group of zealots (coerced by the opportunity to live in a protective, if creepy, community). Both require a certain amount of women’s work (her superiors are always men) and water-cooler talk—the transition between the genres is smooth. The cult leader, Bob,is a “power-hungry IT specialist.” His arm is in a sling from “a botched

MEGAN BOYLE'S NOVEL LIVEBLOG is more than seven hundred pages long and doesn’t attempt to seduce the reader hesitating at its size. “THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE INTERESTING” Boyle writes in paragraph three. “I AM NOT GOING TO TRY TO MAKE THIS SOUND INTERESTING OR TRY TO MAKE YOU LIKE ME OR THINK ABOUT IF YOU ARE READING THIS OR ENJOYING READING THIS, IT’S JUST GOING TO BE WHAT IT IS: A FUNCTIONAL THING THAT WILL HOPEFULLY HELP ME FEEL MORE LIKE IMPROVING MYSELF” Our narrator, Megan Boyle, explains that she will be recording “everything i do, think, feel, and say” in order to develop a sense of

MARK GREIF: I think that Upstate is a beautiful book. Can you say a bit about how you came to write the novel?

JAMES WOOD: I wanted to write about a family, and I wanted to write about the mystery of happiness. Look at any family—in particular, look at any group of siblings—and invariably you find an apparently random distribution of happiness and unhappiness. Why is she confident and buoyant, while he is depressive and unsuccessful in life?

I wanted my novel to be about an older father—Alan is sixty-eight—with two grown-up daughters, who are very different from one another. The elder daughter,

Entirely pristine in its styling, Ottessa Moshfegh’s fourth book, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, opens with the phrase “Whenever I woke up . . .” It is understated, implicit wording—the mild “whenever” simultaneously pointing to no precise time and to various specific times. The words “I woke up” crackle with multiple meanings. Woke from a slumber; woke from a stupor; woke from ignorance; woke from delusion; emerged from grief; emerged revived. It all applies. For a book about a woman so broken and exhausted by life at twenty-four that she sets out to sleep for a year, there couldn’t be a more

In one sense, Keith Gessen’s A Terrible Country picks up where his first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, left off. That book’s last chapter is set in 2008, the year it was published, and narrated by one of the titular young men—needy, resentful, compulsively charming, and not always easily distinguishable Lost Boys who divide their time between anguished political musings, intellectual pissing contests, and the quest to disappoint as many attractive women as they can. After a few years spent mostly in Moscow, a city he notes is “what the world looked like before you covered it up with

In his 1929 essay “Will Talkies Abolish the Theater?” Luigi Pirandello offered a provocative reading of cinema (and defense of the stage) when the younger medium was at a pivotal moment. “The greatest success to which film can aspire, one moving it even farther along the road toward theater, will be to become theater’s photographic and mechanical copy, and a bad one at that. Like all copies, it must arouse a desire for the original.” What stoked Pirandello’s criticism of film was the introduction of sound—he wrote the essay after seeing The Jazz Singer, the first talkie, and not long after