Saunders is making a performance of his imaginative jumps, of empathy itself, with an admirable enthusiasm for entertaining us.

In 1971 Pauline Kael coined the term “Acid Western,” an expression intended as a pejorative commentary on the stoner crowd that gathered for the midnight showings of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo.

Against this backdrop, it was only a matter of time before the gospel of flat design spread to the publishing industry. But what does “frictionless experience” look like in book form?

21. When you say you’re going home, they ask: To Belgrade?

22. For them, it’s as though this war hasn’t happened.

And yet,

23. There are exceptions.

You have become locked into a perpetual toil; making meaning out of this endless string of similarity becomes a matter of close reading, of overlaying the real with the symbolic and from there identifying surges of intensity.

Jim watched the television in the waiting room of Dr. Mallory’s office while he waited for his test results. Something was playing on a loop on the screen.

Kawakami reiterates that women can lead a fulfilling life and make fulfilling choices absent of a romantic partner.

The boundaries between what’s true, what’s imagined, and what’s cocreated are as disorienting and disquieting as a buffalo in the living room.

Since the release of his first novel in 1971, Frederic Tuten has charted a singular course through the comparatively choppy waters of late twentieth-century American belles lettres.

Every day, a new uncovering. People, places, and ideas are revealed to no longer be what they’d seemed to be.

There's an inherent bias in our fiction-making against the mysterious, the uncanny (style—not narrative). For all the left-leaning of the literary industrial complex, there's a rampant conservativism in its language.

You remember a fragment of childhood horror. You’re on the day camp bus, and your seatmate decides to punch you, hard, in the thigh.

Baharevich’s creation is mostly known, if at all, to anglophone audiences through its play-adaptation, which is quite a shame.

Ma takes these mundane episodes and turns them into dreamscapes of subtly fractured logic and absurd literalism.

The resilience needed to seek instead of believe, an author imbibing the world and the self openly, this is what impresses most in Hall’s debut.

The ambulatory novel—positioned as it is between the flaneurial and the loco-descriptive—is generally a solitary affair.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter was very excited to share that, under his own quarantine during the bubonic plague, Shakespeare wrote King Lear.

Brad Listi’s novel about a guy named Brad Listi writing a novel opens with a confession: “This book took twelve years to write.”

Two new books revolve around one place.

Caren Beilin’s Revenge of the Scapegoat is a book about desire, community, and family—but mostly it is story about pain and what we do with it.