Rebecca Schuh
At the beginning of Lara Williams’s Supper Club, we find the narrator Roberta stuck in a typical millennial holding pattern. As she enters her late twenties, Roberta is working an uninspiring assistant job. She spends her free time cooking a lot, socializing very little, and dating never. Flashbacks to Roberta’s college days present her as similarly meek—she rarely ventures off-campus, feels bored by her major, and wonders how to interact with her roommates. Then as now, she makes little effort to shift her circumstances. 
Leah Dieterich’s Vanishing Twins is more than a memoir about love and marriage. It’s a literary experiment in both structure and subject, a novel mix of theory and story. The book examines Dieterich’s marriage to Eric, a man she met in college. When they first got together, they formed an unusually close partnership, creating a private world that felt both thrilling and stifling (as Dieterich notes, they had never spent more than a night apart). Eventually, this dynamic became overwhelming to her, and the couple decided to experiment with non-monogamy. Dieterich narrates the ensuing adventures, both sexual and emotional, At first, it might be hard to see the connection between the ten critics profiled in Michelle Dean’s Sharp. Writers such as Dorothy Parker, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, Janet Malcolm, and Nora Ephron were singular talents—each an uneasy fit for any neat label. What links them, Dean writes, was that they were “sharp”—the word was often used as an insult—and possessed a keen critical facility that was underappreciated at the time but has become extremely influential. Dean’s book is an alternative to the usual, single-subject biography, which often considered “these women in isolation, a phenomenon unto herself.” 
The word essay comes from a French word meaning “to try.” But thinking of an essay as simply an exploratory effort diminishes the form’s deep tradition—one worthy of serious study. With his debut collection, Up Up, Down Down, Cheston Knapp exhibits both a studied mastery of the form and a reverence for its artistry. In his capacious works, Knapp seamlessly weaves seemingly disparate topics. In one essay, he studies the performative nature of professional wrestling alongside memories of a fraught father-son relationship. In another, he scrutinizes both UFO fanatics and his own relationship with Christianity. Knapp excavates the literary 
Rachel Khong Rachel Khong’s debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin, begins after the narrator, Ruth, has been suddenly and inexplicably dumped by her fiancé. Alone and adrift in San Francisco, a city that she has little connection to outside the failed relationship, she decides to cut her losses and move home to help her family cope with her father’s recent Alzheimer’s diagnosis. The landscape and history of Southern California drives the diary-like narrative of Ruth’s return to the Inland Empire. Jarred by the unexpected breakup and her father’s increasingly erratic behavior, Ruth spends much of her time wryly questioning the world 
In the early essays of Melissa Febos’s Abandon Me, we watch her build a relationship with a bedazzling lover as she mines her past for the stories that made her the person she is—from an exploration of hickeys to a taxonomy of the gifts she receives from her lover, which are “beautiful and a little gruesome.” The essays build into an interrogation of relationships, idolization, and how the author’s past intertwines with cultural history. Though the book explores bonds that Febos has with others—lovers, friends, lost and found family members—the relationship it ultimately depicts is the one that she