In these, and many other details, Butler uses biography not voyeuristically, but as an attempt to wholly understand one person. Molly is a cautionary tale about the worst excesses of modern culture, but also a study of some of the most difficult aspects of human nature.
That’s why it matters that Butler wrote this book. Many suffer. Many doubt the value of their lives. “No one is special,” Brodak said. But, as Butler proves with Molly, the opposite is true.
Anita de Monte Laughs Last is one of a group of new novels examining gender, race and intimacy in the world of art and commerce. In the women's relationships especially, there are echoes of Kiley Reid's but here the clashes feel more real, possibly because they're inspired both by a true artworld tragedy and the author's experiences at Brown. And the novel works because Gonzalez approaches its questions through story and character, like a master portraitist, emphasizing granularity and precision. Recounting Anita's story in a nonlinear fashion, the mystery is constructed for maximum suspense, starting at the end of her life, dipping back through her marriage, and giving the narcissistic Jack a chance to speak for himself. The result is a story that moves around without ever losing focus.
Maitland is a precise short story writer, each being a shard from a life or a glance over one. The various protagonists are realist, historical and fictional; so we encounter Rapunzel and Andromeda alongside rebellious trapeze artists, sort-of suffragettes and a woman caught up the Peasants’ Revolt. It would be too easy to classify these works as “magic realist”, and there is an undeniable if faint family resemblance to Angela Carter. That said, while Carter tends to be rambunctious and transgressive, Maitland is more eerily quiet. It does not seem surprising that even the moments of cataclysm and catastrophe in her stories come with a whispered stillness.
Toby Lloyd’s slow burn of a debut novel is in the tradition of the pentagonal family saga, a subgenre that might include Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Add to this formula the elements of religious mysticism, ethnicity (in this case Jewishness), and an exploration of the ethics around using family as material for literature, and you should have a truly combustible mix.
The cliche that we know more about the surface of the moon than about our own oceans is given vivid new currency in this blend of natural history, popular science, travelogue and ecocriticism by the Australian novelist and poet James Bradley. The book takes us from pole to pole and surface to bottom of the blue realm that covers most of Earth.
These questions lie at the heart of Marshall Sahlins’s final book, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity. Across most cultures, Sahlins observes, human life unfolds in continuous reference to other beings—supreme gods and minor deities, ancestral spirits, demons, indwelling souls in animals and plants—who act as the intimate, everyday agents of human success or ruin, whether in agriculture, hunting, procreation, or politics. These not-quite humans, or metapersons, can be found across all landscapes, from the Chewong “leaf people” in the Malay Peninsula to the Greenland Inuits, who had the idea that spirits animate each human joint and knuckle. Indigenous communities possess empirical knowledge about these spirit worlds, yet anthropologists often use the language of “belief”—or worse, “folk belief”—to describe them, an approach loaded with their own disbelief. Rejecting the obscurant category of “belief,” Sahlins asks: What if we saw metapersons as worthy of a science of their own? If we examine them as a ubiquitous global presence, and attempt to tease out general theories about their role in human political and economic life, what would this new science teach us?