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From Stephen Elliott
The first 100 pages of Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings are just that: interesting, but short of compelling. In the late sixties, six teenagers meet at an arts camp named Spirit-In-The-Woods and coin themselves The Interestings, because in the insular world of a summer camp, everyone seems talented and interesting.
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The prolific Percival Everett tackles the timeless psychic tug-of-war between fathers and sons with zigzagging, psychedelic verve in his twentieth novel Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. Everett has mastered his playful, self-referential style, and seems more intent than ever to alternately puzzle and move the reader, often in the span of a single sentence.
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Steven Barthelme’s new collection of short stories Hush Hush plays like the best of saddest love songs. These are elegiac, yet hopeful stories about characters who bumble through existence, struggle to articulate their feelings, and careen towards moments that can’t be unlived and precipices where possibility, crushing loss, and logic-less misdeeds intersect.
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Heidi Julavits’ latest novel The Vanishers is provocative and full of hefty, even academic ideas—at its best, a nouveau feminist manifesto.
Both rhetorically playful and plot driven, Tom McCarthy’s first novel, Men in Space, now out in the U.S., floats in between his other novels Remainder and C.
Edited and illustrated by Arthur Jones, Post-It Note Diaries collects 20 mundane but evocative tales by storytellers ranging from Chuck Klosterman to Andrew Bird.
Set in the 1840s Midwest, Kris Saknussemm’s second novel, Enigmatic Pilot, delivers unexpected characters in a surreal interpretation of American history.
With wit and insight, Dany Laferriere, the Haitian-Canadian novelist, explores national identity and cultural authenticity in his latest book, I Am a Japanese Writer.
Manu Joseph’s satirizes contemporary India, “pounding away at the caste system like a pitcher repeatedly throwing his best fastball.”
