In Lucy Ives’s second novel, Loudermilk, a charismatic dumbass scams his way into a prestigious MFA poetry program by submitting the work of his antisocial companion. The real writer, who hates the sound of his own voice, follows the oversexed, symmetrically featured dumbass to school and continues to write for him. It’s a fun setup, but the book aims for more than just comedy. Ives, who once described herself as “the author of some kind of thinking about writing,” examines the conditions that produce authors and their work while never losing a sense of wonder at the sheer mystery of the written

Crackhead, pothead, pillhead, oldhead. The suffix “-head” tends to mark a genre of name-calling. It smacks of a compulsiveness that renders your activities illicit or, at the very least, will have you deemed a space-cadet. But when you claim yourselfas a head—a sneakerhead, a Beatlehead, a hip-hophead—the suffix carries a somewhat uppity declaration of expertise, at once a boast and an assertion of membership in a particular culture or scene. Originally “hip-hophead” implied specific cultural and political commitments to the everyday survival of black people. But due to the ways the US music

What is color to literature? For one thing, a problem. Language deals in delineation. This makes it an odd match to account for color—an abstract, pure vividness—which, on its own, has no differentiating power at all. At the same time, without color, visual differentiation becomes difficult. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in the introduction to his 1810 Theory of Colours, wrote that “the eye sees no form, inasmuch as light, shade, and colour together constitute that which to our vision distinguishes object from object.”

It’s no surprise, then, that most attempts to give a literary account of

Sally Rooney. Sally Rooney! Sally Rooney, the twenty-eight-year-old Irish novelist celebrated as the “first great millennial author,” is interested in weird relationships, or relationships that seem weird but are quietly common within the young, educated, and progressive milieu she depicts. Her debut, 2017’s Conversations with Friends, concerns a nonmonogamous not-quite-affair between Frances, a twenty-one-year-old student/budding writer, and Nick, a sexy, depressed actor in his thirties; judging, resenting, and flirting from the edges of this initially secret romance are his wife, Melissa,