Autofiction is usually accompanied with disclaimers and explanations, shame and caveats. Caroline O’Donoghue’s new novel The Rachel Incident (Knopf; 304 pages), too, is bookended with disclaimers. It opens with, “It was never my plan to write about any of this” and closes with the protagonist saying, “It’s not my story.” Though it is unclear how much memoir this confessional novel actually holds, this conceit of autofiction is marvelously executed—the details of memory feel preciously excavated, the plot clicks in place in that inevitable way of real life. Even at its most alarming—the protagonist extorts an older couple to fund her […]

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With her fifth novel, Yellowface (William Morrow; 323 pages), R.F. Kuang promised a departure from the speculative genre work of her fantasy Poppy Wars trilogy and science fiction Babel (2022), winner of the 2022 Nebula Award for Best Novel. Yellowface is a biting satire about the publishing industry, informed by Kuang’s own experience as a Chinese American writer who regularly tops bestseller lists. It follows the publication of protagonist June Hayward’s second novel, a historical drama titled The Last Front about Chinese laborers who fought for the Allied Forces in World War I. Kuang writes for a wide audience, and […]

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There are many routes to be introduced to British novelist Deborah Levy’s August Blue (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 208 pages). It is a book about being shadowed by a “double,” so one thinks of Dostoevsky and Henry James’ short story “The Jolly Corner.” It is a book about a child prodigy’s intense and complicated relationship with her mentor, so one is reminded of movies like Whiplash and Black Swan. It is an Odyssean story of exile and return home. It is also a sort of “governess story”: as Elizabeth Hardwick writes in The Brontes, “Most governesses in fiction are strangely […]

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The characters in Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans (320 pages; Riverhead Books) are poets, dancers, painters, students, and townies, lovers, and exes, “upright beasts, walking on their hind legs, baying at electric moons.” Except for a few, they are in their twenties and on the brink of proper adulthood. There is an engaging urgency in their lives and in Taylor’s new novel, his second after Real Life (2020), a Booker Prize finalist. The book, a novel-in-stories, deftly weaves the lives of students from the university with the community around it—Obama-era Iowa City—depicting where the two collide and recoil back into […]

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