Hannah Gold
IT HAS BEEN SAID that in his greatest roles Al Pacino plays characters who through temperament and actions—whether noble or nefarious—wind up utterly alone. Cut off, even, from some vital part of themselves, the mercy or cynicism that might have restored balance to their lives. But what Al Pacino character craves balance? His Frank Serpico […] 
HELEN OYEYEMI’S NEW NOVEL Parasol Against the Axe, set amid a bachelorette party weekend in Prague, abounds in side quests breezily undertaken and abandoned. You don’t need to think about the bachelorette party all that much. Actually, you can’t. The rate at which Oyeyemi invents thickets of problems without answers, obstacles to bounce over, mysteries to shrug at, is frantic, like in those dreams where you have to run very fast in order to move slowly. 
IN 2014, the novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick reviewed the collected fiction of Bernard Malamud for the New York Times. Ozick adores her slightly older contemporary for his bruised moral seriousness. The essay contains just one asterisk: “The reviewer has not read and is not likely ever to read ‘The Natural,’ a baseball novel said to incorporate a mythical theme. Myth may be myth, but baseball is still baseball, so never mind.” 
IN AN ESSAY ABOUT NATALIA GINZBURG, the Chilean novelist and critic Alejandro Zambra writes, “When someone repeats a story we presume they don’t remember that they’ve already told it, but often we repeat stories consciously, because we are unable to repress the desire, the joy of telling them again.” Of course the compulsion to retell a story is not always situated in joy’s lofty terrain. We might repeat a story in the hopes of shrinking it to a manageable bite, or because it reminds us of another story, or to shine up disagreeable aspects of our lives, or to mock