What’s Happening?

ELVIA WILK ON HOW TO NAME A DISASTER

Good as Hell

JOHANNA FATEMAN ON THE INTOXICATING GLOOM OF PHILIPPA GREGORY’S HISTORICAL FICTON

Notes from the Cave

JOSHUA COHEN ON SEARCHING FOR PROPHECY IN THE MIDST OF A PANDEMIC

Close to the Knives

R. O. KWON on ballet

God’s Neon

SASHA FRERE-JONES on Denis Johnson’s Already Dead: A California Gothic

Do Your Job

SAM LIPSYTE on God’s gratuitous punishments of Job

The Atrocity Exhibition

EMILY RABOTEAU on Berlin under siege

The Other America

DANIELLE A. JACKSON on a new memoir of race relations, religion, and farming

Sister Act

MOIRA DONEGAN on Benedetta Carlini’s immodest devotion

Against Damnation

MICHAEL ROBBINS on a hell-less version of Christianity

That Elusive Thing

NEGAR AZIMI on Gary Indiana’s Horse Crazy and the torment of romantic obsession

Lonely Planet

BRIDGET READ on EarthCam’s seductive vision of the Anthropocene afterlife

A Journal of the Plague Year

AUDREY WOLLEN on Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”

Instant Karma

JESS ROW on Buddhist portrayals of unending human suffering

Purity of the Heart Is to Follow One Thing

JUSTIN TAYLOR on the emo existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard

For Goodness’ Sake

LAUREN OYLER on the self-conscious drama of morality in contemporary fiction

Meditations in an Emergency

JENNIFER KRASINSKI on a mystic’s passionate contemplation of the divine

City of the Damned

SARAH RESNICK on the hell that is New York real estate

Comedy of Heirs

EILEEN MYLES on Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy

A Lover’s Discord

CLANCY MARTIN on agony and ecstasy in The Idiot

Disco Paradiso

MELISSA ANDERSON on disco

TOM CARSON on Lawrence Wright’s pandemic thriller

BOOKFORUM CONTRIBUTORS on the season’s outstanding art books

CHRISTIAN LORENTZEN interviews Lydia Millet

ERIC BANKS on Nick Tosches

JAMES CAMP: J. M. Coetzee’s The Death of Jesus

ELIZABETH FLOCK: Megha Majumdar’s A Burning

ALBERT MOBILIO: Thaddeus Mosley

POROCHISTA KHAKPOUR: Marc Petitjean’s The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris

SAM HUBER: Maggie Doherty’s The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s

CARL WILSON: Grace Elizabeth Hale’s Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture

JULIANA HALPERT: Murals of New York City: The Best of New York’s Public Paintings from Bemelmans to Parrish

MARCO ROTH: Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life

ELIAS RODRIQUES: Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States

JESSE BARRON: Barton Gellman’s Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State and Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge’s Snowden’s Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance

YEN PHAM: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s The Undocumented Americans