Laura Marsh

Shared Delusions

Katie Kitamura’s latest novel prizes open the question of what a family is and what pretenses sustain it.

A Self Divided

Since the rise of cable TV, corporations have sought to capture our valuable attention. But the way social media shatters our ability to focus has new implications for public discourse and politics.

Not So Bad Guys

Joseph O’Neill’s new novel, Godwin, is a workplace drama that also manages to animate the forces that are fracturing our politics.

Human Resources

In her new novel, Adelle Waldman gambles that it’s possible to draw out the interiority of her characters mainly by sketching their working conditions.

The Pregnancy Plot

In Reproduction, Louisa Hall combines a science-fiction riff on Frankenstein with the isolating reality of pregnancy in the contemporary United States.

The Taste for Argument

“Good criticism should establish what is at stake in a book, that there is, in fact, something worth arguing about.”

The Nonconformist

The mood of John le Carré’s posthumously published novel, Silverview, is brisk and knowing compared with the melancholic, regretful tone of the earlier books.

Are the Kids All Right?

If Jonathan Franzen’s earlier books were steeped in ironic social observation, Crossroads is an experiment in sincerity.

‘Being Charlie’

If sex had a defining feature in the 1990s, it was ubiquity

Dancing Kafka

In this adaptation of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Edward Watson evokes the nightmarish experience Kafka describes—of a man who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect—through the vocabulary of ballet.