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 was it

It begins with a nuclear holocaust unleashed by a former reality-TV star aboard an extravagantly self-branded zeppelin; it ends with a tech journalist running blindly into the graveyard once known as Prospect Park. Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha is a bizarre chimera that cobbles together adventure story, torture porn, cautionary manifesto, sociopolitical satire, magazine interview, and metafiction.

What we talk about when we talk about women talking: Gossip. Secrets. Men. Sex. Babies. Broken hearts. First dates. Messy divorces. The Bechdel Test. Men again. Still. Always?

As someone who lives uptown, I’m used to qualifying that my boyfriend bought our apartment for cheap in the late ’90s. My desire to lightly establish my adjacent moral authority—he’s not a banker, slumlord, or trustfunder, he’s just from New York—is as inevitable as strangers wanting to know my cross streets. Where on the Upper East Side? is a follow-up question I’ve come to expect, and it elicits the information people nod at in knowing recognition, and saves them from asking uncouth questions: How close to the park? How far from East Harlem? Where would gossip be without light taxonomy?

In a 2015 Guardian article titled “The Death of Writing,” the novelist Tom McCarthy argued that fiction, which had retreated into “comforting nostalgia,” had been replaced by the “funky architecture firms, digital media companies and brand consultancies that have assumed the mantle of the cultural avant garde.” “If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce,” he went on, “they’re probably working for Google.”