Sam Lipsyte
IT WAS LATE ON THE FIRST NIGHT of Corona Times Passover and my teenage son chewed on a piece of matzo. Mind you, we were not following dietary restrictions. We’d had Hawaiian pizza for dinner, during which I’d rehashed the flight from Egypt, but hours later we were bored and peckish and broke in to the box of Streit’s my wife, who is not Jewish, had been kind enough to score at the supermarket. 
Among many delights, Don DeLillo’s extraordinary new novel offers a bracing revision of our certitude about death and taxes. The rich, after all, learned long ago to evade the latter with offshore accounts and IRS loopholes, but in Zero K, the wealthiest have also, possibly, dodged mortality, that ultimate drag. Pay the right price for a cryonic pod and you too can slip into a heavy slumber until medicine finds a cure for what’s killing you, after which you will be thawed, treated, and sent off to live in deathless splendor in tomorrow’s gated utopia. If this sounds like a Since my fiction is usually about people, and I consider sex one of the more important and emotionally fascinating activities people undertake, sometimes I must run the gauntlet of writing a sex scene. The results vary, though I try to make a habit of not publishing the many occasions when things don’t work. “Don’t worry,” I console myself, stroking my arm. “It happens.”