Ottessa Moshfegh’s narrators exhibit a curious combination of extreme moral nihilism and a desperate need for violent, unforgettable experiences. Eileen, her new and best novel, is a love story told by a young woman who doesn’t understand love and who is leaving behind the only man she really loves, her father. Eileen hates her father, too. He is an abusive alcoholic, who bullies and even assaults his teenage daughter: “In my last years with him my father would occasionally wrap his flat hands around my pencil-thin throat and threaten that he could squeeze the life out of me any time

Back in the last millennium (1993, to be exact), I was asked to serve as the house hipster on a panel at an advertising conference in San Francisco. At the time, digital marketing, the subject of the conference, was still bleeding-edge stuff, not the ubiquitous warp and weft of our matrixed present. These were the days of Al Gore’s fabled “Information Superhighway,” to be brought to you by that miraculous oxymoron, the “smart TV.” Mosaic, the first widely available Web browser, had just been released. For most, the Internet meant Prodigy, CompuServe, America Online—Candy Land interfaces known as “walled gardens”

When crack cocaine enters a story, we usually brace ourselves for a downfall. The tales of those who have fallen prey to the drug are so familiar that they have taught even nonusers to consider themselves experts. Many speak knowingly of the crack addict—gaunt, unkempt, willing to do anything for the next fix. In James Hannaham’s second novel, Delicious Foods, crack figures heavily in two ways. Darlene Hardison, a young widow, is an addict, and Scotty, who narrates a good deal of the novel, is crack personified (that’s right: Crack is one of the novel’s narrators). This is a welcome

The chaotic, exuberant, vexatious poems of Rachel Zucker’s Museum of Accidents (2009) exhibited the distractions, depletions, and exhilarations of a modern urban motherhood: Some sounded as if Zucker had composed them while shepherding her toddler through the subway, others as if she had made them up at the conclusion of a sleep-deprived night. It was an uncommonly honest, almost embarrassing poetry, one that seemed artless if you read it too fast, and yet one achingly aware of precedents: Zucker called one long poem “Hey Allen Ginsberg Where Have You Gone and What Would You Think of My Drugs?” In another,

In A Legacy, first published in 1956, Sybille Bedford writes about a Germany in the years before the First World War that had almost disappeared even as it seemed to be in full bloom. This world of privilege and entitlement and eccentricity is presented as normal and natural and at a stage of rich development for those who inhabited it. But the author knows, and the reader too, that it is doomed.

Marlon James’s epic and dizzying third novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, is anything but brief and describes far more than seven killings. The book’s two main backdrops are Kingston, Jamaica, during the political warfare of the late 1970s and New York City during the crack epidemic of the mid-’80s. Both of these settings allow the author to display his exquisite talent for penning death scenes, which appear with a frequency that brings to mind the Iliad. Where James’s previous novel, The Book of Night Women, described the desire for freedom and power in a matriarchal community, his latest

Women who make “good” choices are generally said to have self-respect. At the very least, our usual definition of the quality assumes that a woman make choices at all—or, progressive opinion might have it, that she be aware she isn’t making any. Miranda July—whose characters are wimpish, lonely, and lacking in self-knowledge—does not seem preoccupied by self-respect of this conventional kind. Instead her characters wait, with various degrees of whimsical passivity, for their lives to change. “I am prepared for amazing things to happen,” says a mall shoe salesman in July’s first movie, Me and You and Everyone We Know

In several recent novels the succinct, startling prose of Jean Echenoz has achieved the condition of a highly durable, transparent membrane, something like the trompe l’oeil mesh often used now to mask scaffolding on building facades under repair. Imposing a Beckettian principle that drastically less is immensely more, Echenoz summons a fulsome picture of his characters and their worlds with a scattering of surgically exact, granular details both irreproachably veracious and wildly defamiliarizing, such as the swarm of mosquitoes that attacks the protagonist of I’m Gone (1999) as his dogsled approaches the Arctic Circle: Yes, there is a mosquito problem

How much less violence we would do to our lives, Rachel Cusk’s eighth novel suggests, if we could bear disenchantment. Outline is composed mainly of conversations between the narrator, Faye, and the people she meets in Athens, where she’s teaching a summer writing course. Through the stories told to Faye by strangers, acquaintances, and friends, Cusk illustrates how the “principle of progress” causes people to destroy what they have in their search for the next thing. One man attributes the end of his marriage to him and his wife’s running out of mutual goals to accomplish (house, children, travel): “If

In False Positives and False Negatives (8), 2012, artists Jane and Louise Wilson show one way to maintain anonymity in a surveillance state: by using face paint. By now, chances are good you’ve read a thing or two about Dave Eggers’s The Circle. There’s been some controversy about plagiarism (as if there’s no way two […]