Books

New reviews

• 

• M.F.A. meets S&M

• Whip Smart, by Melissa Febos

•  

• Melissa Febos recalls her double life as a New York City college student and a high-end dominatrix.

• 

• Flipping the witch

• Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, by Dubravka Ugresic

•  

• A novelist slyly reinterprets a Slavic folktale about a scary old hag who devours small children.

• 

• Verbal collagist

• All the Whiskey in Heaven, by Charles Bernstein

•  

• Charles Bernstein's poems mash up phrases from contemporary culture, reflect on the slipperiness of language and make you laugh.

• 

• New York City books

• Normal People Don’t Live Like This, by Dylan Landis + Ten Walks/Two Talks, by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch

•  

• Two fantastic works inspire us to look at the city with a renewed awe.

• 

• A despicable man

• The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte

•  

• With wondrous sentences, acidic humor and bigheartedness, this book turns loser lit into high art.

• 

• Death-haunted vignettes

• The Abyss of Human Illusion, by Gilbert Sorrentino

•  

• In his final novel, the late Gilbert Sorrentino finds an inventive fictional format in which to express his bilious and funny meditations on adultery, human frailty and writing itself.

• 

• Lust for lit

• The Possessed, by Elif Batuman

•  

• This idea-driven and sometimes eccentric book delightfully captures the author's obsession with Russian literature.

• 

• Emotional porn

• A Common Pornography, by Kevin Sampsell

•  

• Sampsell's memoir lurches between humor, tragedy and triumph—and often touches on all three at once.

• 

• Multigenre manifesto

• Reality Hunger, by David Shields

•  

• Sick of novels, David Shields advocates for a new genre—one that will explode the boundaries between truth and fiction.

• 

• Lyrical nonfiction

• About a Mountain, by John D'Agata

•  

• This book about political myopia, nuclear threat and activism could have been merely informative, but the author turns it into something transcendent.

• 

• All-male dystopia

• The Silver Hearted, by David McConnell

•  

• In this stylish new novel, pirates, shady corporations and a young sailor complicate a mysterious man's journey.

• 

• Sex, witchcraft and the apocalypse

• Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever, by Justin Taylor

•  

• This imaginative first story collection deftly walks the line between the mundane and the grotesque.

• 

• War of the words

• Point Omega, by Don DeLillo

•  

• In his slender, laconic new novel, DeLillo slows down the rapid approach of the world's end—all the better to examine it.

• 

• Mourning papers

• The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis, by Mark Gluth

•  

• Mark Gluth's arty first novel blazes an easy-to-follow path into dreamlike logic and intense feelings of loss.

• 

• A protopunk priestess looks back

• Just Kids, by Patti Smith

•  

• Patti Smith celebrates New York's '70s art scene in this memoir of her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.