The unnamed narrator of A Luminous Republic believes in bad omens. On arriving in a new city with his family for a civil service post…
Many of the stories in Emma Cline’s provocatively titled short-story collection feature older men whose stars are fading, numbing themselves from the world’s increasing indifference to their influence with booze, pills…
Since Donald Trump ascended to the Oval Office in spite of his crude “locker-room talk”, masculinity has been a hot topic. As three new books demonstrate, the causes and consequences…
“Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly,” begins Elena Ferrante’s new novel, her first since the global sensation of the Neapolitan quartet.…
Like Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel Eileen (2015), Death in Her Hands plays with the conventions of noir. Vesta Gul, a recently widowed 72-year-old, lives in a secluded lake cabin in…
‘Posterity, take notice!’ is an exhortation that appears twenty-three times in the posthumously published diary of Roland Bouley, a provincial bookseller and frustrated novelist. The only person taking notice, however, is…