ON APRIL 12, Joyce Carol Oates, who’s had a surprise second act as a social-media provocateur, tweeted, “Much prose by truly great writers (Poe, Melville, James) is actually just awkward, inept, hit-or-miss, something like stream-of-consciousness in an era before revising was relatively easy.” Like much Tweeting by truly great Tweeters, Oates’s hot take struck a nerve because it reflected the zeitgeist; whatever one’s feelings about the nineteenth-century masters, one must concede the current vogue for tightly structured novels, rendered in lucid, well-modulated prose. For a long time now,

There is a Shinto myth called kotodama that implies there are divine powers in the Old Japanese language—koto meaning “speech” or “word” and dama meaning “soul” or “ghost.” In this cosmogony, different words were believed to contain different qualities: a positive word could bring positive spirits and a negative word could wake up the demons inside. Practitioners of Shinto would erase loanwords from Chinese during their rituals to make their prayers as linguistically “pure” as possible. Nowadays, however, if you google kotodama, the internet returns links on the New Age potential of Aikido,

“ALL WOMEN ARE NOT UNHAPPY,” the Japanese writer Yūko Tsushima wrote in the Chicago Tribune, but women are made to suffer more “just because they are women.” By design, a system animated by capitalism and heteropatriarchy is especially cruel to single mothers. I remember nearly nothing of my childhood, yet I harbor acute recollections of my mother waitressing or bartending while I perched primly atop a barstool, memorizing my Mariah Carey cassette and learning what humiliation borne of economic necessity looks like. The phrase “to make ends meet” has one origin in dressmaking, meaning to gather

IN STORIES ABOUT INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL, space usually wins out over time. The accounting of minutes and hours is too petty, too human, for the vast distance between one star and another; some genres just won’t accommodate the clockface. This is true of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, in which mad astronauts prove incapable of distinguishing between past and present, as well the Swedish poem and film Aniara, about a spaceship destined for a future of endless drift—which is to say, no future at all. Few places are as interminable as outer space, which urgently raises the question of where one is while rendering

TESSA HADLEY’S NEW NOVEL, Free Love, begins in 1967 London. The book is split between Otterley, a fictional suburb of manicured houses and back gardens, and Ladbroke Grove, the site of hippie excess, progressive dropping out, and émigré professional striving. Hadley focuses on Phyllis Fischer, a forty-year-old housewife, and her fifteen-year-old daughter Colette. The attention to these two characters, as they break slowly and then all at once from the circuits of the lives expected for them, makes up the bulk of the plot. Phyllis is elegant, the well-groomed and beautifully dressed mistress of