Meg Wolitzer. Photo: Nina Subin Meg Wolitzer’s new novel, The Female Persuasion, tells the story of Greer, a young college-aged woman, and her famous feminist mentor, Faith Frank. Through the book, Wolitzer explores both second-wave feminism and a younger generation’s responses to it. Along with the novel’s explicit political focus is the story of a life-altering female friendship. Through this relationship, Wolitzer observes the changing conditions of her characters’ lives in the context of feminism and misogyny—something she had been thinking about long before Trump and Weinstein. Wolitzer and I discussed the book this February. Reading the novel in

“The Raincoats were a group of women who were, in part, just learning to play their instruments, but their debut album also coincides with the start of a whole artistic sensibility, one of fearless and knowing amateurism,” Pitchfork contributing editor Jenn Pelly writes in her recent book about the origins of the Raincoats, part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 music writing series. The band—which in 1979 meant Ana da Silva (guitar), Gina Birch (bass), Vicki Aspinall (violin), Palmolive (drums), and Shirley O’Loughlin (manager and collaborator)—pursued uninhibited expression through imperfect post-punk poetry. Over The Raincoats’s eleven tracks, the four players switch

I met author Tony Tulathimutte at a reading in Manhattan where he asked the audience to vote on which section of his novel Private Citizens to read from: the one on writer’s workshops or the one on pornography. Porn won, and Tony delivered a complex, funny, and disturbing passage about Will, one of the book’s protagonists, a desperate, recent college graduate. Later, when I saw his blurb recommending Malcolm Harris’s new study, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, I read the book and was impressed by its sweeping socio-economic critique. As the pub date for

Andrew Durbin Over the past few years, I’ve heard Andrew Durbin read a handful of times from material that would comprise his debut novel, MacArthur Park. Blushing, he’d rush through the reading, his anxious timbre at odds with the confidently intelligent voice of his prose. Named for Donna Summer’s 1978 hit song, the novel is a series of snapshots, a scrapbook of scenes following a voyeuristic narrator, Nick (who, like Durbin, is a writer—a poet, obsessed with death, distracted by sex—and a lover of contemporary art) as he travels to dance clubs in Brooklyn, an artists’ residency upstate, the

Lucy Ives was supposed to be writing her dissertation when Stella Krakus, the main character in Ives’s debut novel, Impossible Views of the World, came into her mind. It would take six years for Stella to fully emerge, but when she did, she brought an unlikely triumvirate of irrepressible qualities: a nerd’s expertise in maps and early Americana, a kooky and misanthropic sense of self, and a gimlet eye for the art world in which she seems surprised to have found herself. Stella is a curator at the fictional Central Museum of Art in Manhattan, and when one of

Albert Mobilio From the story of a race with no finish line to the story of a hunt for a used slipper, the mischievous, ludic distortions of Albert Mobilio’s Games Stunts are like images in a funhouse mirror reflecting both gaming culture and culture at large. “This is the way of the world,” squawks one narrator, parroting a shopworn mantra whose Trumpian tang tastes extra bitter these days, “all against all, winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” But Mobilio’s sardonic literary gloss on competition defies Manichean simplicities. You can’t easily win a race when there’s no finish line.

Rachel Khong Rachel Khong’s debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, begins after the narrator, Ruth, has been suddenly and inexplicably dumped by her fiancé. Alone and adrift in San Francisco, a city that she has little connection to outside the failed relationship, she decides to cut her losses and move home to help her family cope with her father’s recent Alzheimer’s diagnosis. The landscape and history of Southern California drives the diary-like narrative of Ruth’s return to the Inland Empire. Jarred by the unexpected breakup and her father’s increasingly erratic behavior, Ruth spends much of her time wryly questioning the world

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 Iowa town. Rendered in hyper-realistic

Judith E. Stein 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 Gallery backers) Robert and

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 unfamiliar men who