Gemma Sieff
Jonathan Safran Foer is the Louis C.K. of the Jews. “I feel like America is the world’s worst girlfriend,” Louis says in one of his routines. “When somebody hurts America, she remembers it forever. But if she does anything bad, it’s like, ‘What? I didn’t do anything.’” Foer, too, likens romance to world events. In his new novel, Here I Am, he compares the dissolution of a marriage to a devastating earthquake in Israel. But where Louis plays this type of hyperbole for laughs, we are never quite sure how to react to Foer’s histrionics—he’s both the teller of the 
Emma Cline A month ago, I attended a reading by Emma Cline at BookCourt, in Brooklyn. Cline’s debut novel, The Girls, had just come out to breathless reviews, and the event was well attended. Cline, twenty-seven, seemed neither nervous nor overeager to please. She announced she’d be reading from the beginning of her novel and read its opening passage and then another page or two, stopping after a few minutes and making a joke—that she always wished readings would end sooner than they did—that was at once unpretentious and spot-on. Less-is-more is a concept Cline understands. The Girls is