In the early essays of Melissa Febos's Abandon Me, we watch her build a relationship with a bedazzling lover as she mines her past for the stories that made her the person she is—from an exploration of hickeys to a taxonomy of the gifts she receives from her lover, which are "beautiful and a little gruesome." The essays build into an interrogation of relationships, idolization, and how the author's past intertwines with cultural history. Though the book explores bonds that Febos has with others—lovers, friends, lost and found family members—the relationship it ultimately depicts is the one that

“No one is about to do anything crazy, except me.” We might want to worry if it’s a murderer who says this. Thankfully, it’s only Rio Silvestri, the high-functioning narrator of Kelly Luce’s novel Pull Me Under (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). Rio is a nurse, jogger, wife, and mother of a twelve-year-old. She seems to have her shit together. But when she receives a letter from Japan, her life starts to come apart. Because Rio isn’t her real name. And we might have something to worry about.

She’s actually Chizuru Akitani, daughter of Japan’s Living National Treasure, the violinist Hiro Akitani.

John Darnielle is a master of sympathetically depicting his characters, both in his music (he's the front man of the indie-folk band the Mountain Goats) and his novels. In both mediums, Darnielle renders his subjects—whether they are weirdos, sinners or some combination of the two—with tender empathy. His new novel, Universal Harvester, details the lives of Jeremy, a video-store clerk, and Stephanie, the schoolteacher he has a crush on. When they stumble on a number of mysteriously edited tapes that contain disturbing footage, they're pushed to explore the hidden, sinister side of their small

Judith E. Stein's book Eye of the Sixties: Richard Bellamy and the Transformation of Modern Art examines the life of the art dealer who founded the fabled Green Gallery and was an early champion of artists including Mark di Suvero, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and Donald Judd. Stein's investigation—built on interviews with Bellamy's friends, family, colleagues, and lovers—spans from Bellamy's Cincinnati childhood as the son of an American father and a Chinese mother, to his time in Provincetown with members of the beat generation, to his later interactions with collectors (and Green

Alexandra Kleeman’s fiction may share affinities with the luminaries of our postmodern canon—Don DeLillo, Robert Coover, and Ben Marcus—but her sensibility equally recalls the films of David Lynch. With an eye toward the macabre within the mundane, Kleeman’s fiction tantalizes and spooks, thrusting the reader into bizarre worlds of dream logic. Each of the twelve stories in her new collection Intimations are enigmatic fables bound by a sense of emotional urgency: In the opening story “Fairy Tale,” a woman finds herself at a dinner table with her parents, where they are joined by a group of

When I first met Adam Fitzgerald in 2009, we were both fledgling graduate students, and I knew from the moment he entered the room that he was the personification of a promising young poet, with whirlwind energy, incredible charisma, and insatiable precocity. Now, his second book of poems, George Washington, is being published by Liveright, and he’s already an eminent figure in twenty-first century poetry.

If Fitzgerald’s debut, The Late Parade, is—as the New York Times Book Review described it—“as textured as a corridor in the Louvre,” then George Washington is as gritty and gaudy as Route

When Lidudumalingani Mqombothi (he coolly goes by his first name) sat down to write "Memories We Lost," the short story that won him the 2016 Caine Prize for African Writing, he’d finished film school having felt frustrated at the lack of creative freedom on which film schools tend to pride themselves. The story, which he previously sought to turn into a film, concerns two teenage sisters, the younger of whom battles an unnamed mental illness in a community that seeks to cure her through traditional means. The older sister attempts to protect her sister from her illness and her community while

When in French: Love in a Second Language is New Yorker staff writer Lauren Collins's memoir of falling in love with a Frenchman and navigating life overseas. It isn't a linear story; instead Collins combines episodic anecdotes with heavily researched passages exploring linguistics. Appropriately, section headings make use of complicated French verb tenses. Flashbacks are simply “The Past” (Le Passé composé), for example; Collins's childhood is “The Imperfect” (L’Imparfait); and the more recent past is “The Past Perfect” (Le Plus-que-parfait). As Collins tells it, “I could have given each

August 2 would have been James Baldwin’s ninety-second birthday. Across the Internet, people celebrated by quoting his work, sometimes with just text, sometimes through memes, so much so that by early Tuesday morning, “James Baldwin” was trending on Twitter. But over the last few years, in our extended cultural moment of racism becoming tangible to more than those it affects, Baldwin—his ideas and forecast for this country—has resurfaced like a message in a bottle, the words he wrote always true, yet now eerily prescient.

His 1963 work, The Fire Next Time, with its forward-glancing title, was

A month ago, I attended a reading by Emma Cline at BookCourt, in Brooklyn. Cline’s debut novel, The Girls, had just come out to breathless reviews, and the event was well attended. Cline, twenty-seven, seemed neither nervous nor overeager to please. She announced she’d be reading from the beginning of her novel and read its opening passage and then another page or two, stopping after a few minutes and making a joke—that she always wished readings would end sooner than they did—that was at once unpretentious and spot-on. Less-is-more is a concept Cline understands. The Girls is taut and gripping,

Mike Albo’s first book, Hornito: My Lie Life (2000), labeled a novel, switches between the viewpoint of a gay kid trying to stay alive physically, mentally, and spiritually in the American suburbs, and that of his adult self, hanging out in New York City’s queer scene in the 1990s. He tries to find love, or decide if he even wants love, while dealing with the world’s association of being gay with “dirtiness.” It feels both true and wildly imaginative, as if the “this is just a novel” shield protected Albo the writer so he could let Albo the character slide all the way off the rails. Some of

Depressed as a teenager in London, Helen Oyeyemi wrote a novel instead of studying for her A-level exams, had it published at the age of twenty, and headed off to Cambridge, where she wrote two plays. Oyeyemi then spent her twenties writing four more novels and traveling the world before settling in Prague, a city with which she felt a mysterious affinity—she sensed there the potential for fantastical happenings.

In her seventh book and first collection of short stories, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, Oyeyemi stretches the bounds of fiction with fairytale-like parables that contain more locks