
A guy, a girl, and their AI buddy
Ian McEwan’s darkly whimsical 15th novel is “Machines Like Me” (Jonathan Cape, 2019), a speculation on Artificial Intelligence that overflows [...]

Prisoner #174,517
The year 2019 marks the centennial of Turin-born Italian writer Primo Levi’s birth. "If this is a Man," a searing [...]

Obioma’s colliding cultures
In Chicozie Obioma’s “An Orchestra of Minorities” (Little Brown, 2019), an invasive white culture is portrayed as eating away at [...]

Crashing Black Friday
In the short story collection "Friday Black" (Mariner Books, 2018), young American writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah delivers a scorching debut [...]

Hazardous ducks
In “Your Duck is My Duck” (Harper Collins, 2918), the extraordinary American writer Deborah Eisenberg returns with six, novella-length tales [...]

A chilling kind of convenience
Novelist Sakaya Murato's "Convenience Store Woman" (Portobello Books, 2018), a huge Japanese hit only recently translated into English, has quickly [...]

Kudos for Cusk
Rachel Cusk’s recent “Kudos” closes a brilliant trilogy of novels —beginning with 2014’s “Outline”— that was dubbed “Faye” by some, [...]

Is Less the new more?
In San Francisco, "mid-level novelist" Arthur Less nears his landmark 50th birthday. Simultaneously, his young lover Freddy announces he’s getting [...]

Denis Johnson’s last largesse
Nighttime, a man wakes, dons a robe. Barefoot, he wanders the silent neighborhood. Perhaps he'll encounter "a magic sword… a [...]

Eco’s populist prophesy
The populist right's global political surge has led Italian publisher La nave di Teseo to reprint the English translation of [...]

Barnes on “Love”
In the 1960s, a youth and a married woman take a chance on madcap love. The result pitches tent between passion and melancholy.