There aren’t five other living American authors as meticulous and shrewd as Dana Spiotta, as willing (to say nothing of able) to shape true esotericism into such consistently accessible forms. Her novels—four of them to date, arriving roughly every half decade—are taut and scintillant, intermittently comic though without much risk of becoming “comedies,”a quality her work shares with that of her longtime mentor, Don DeLillo. Her new novel, Innocents and Others, reprises many of her signature themes—Los Angeles, film, the long shadow of the ’60s, the loneliness of lives lived in disguise—but the more time you spend with it, the

Several years ago (five, to be exact—my youngest had just taken her first steps) I became obsessed with questions of mothers and literature. I wanted a full accounting: mothers who wrote literature (and the logistics), literature about mothers and motherhood—not just books with mothers but books in which mothering is the point. I was particularly interested in archetypes of mothers in fiction, in whether there were any dramatic structures inherent to motherhood that could make or had made great complex stories. My questions were entirely self-interested. I wanted to find the trajectory from my purse full of baby wipes and

At a time when the notion of a poetic career—with its requisite curriculum vitae, residencies, prize panels, and sabbaticals—has long been in ascendancy, it can seem almost quaint to recall that poverty or a sad demise was once a not-uncommon fate for a poet (think Keats, Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, Anne Sexton, Hart Crane). John Wieners met such an end in 2002, when he collapsed returning from a party in Beacon Hill, Boston. He was taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, where, lacking identification, he lay unconscious for days and then was removed from the respirator. Almost until the very

Lucia Berlin was born November 12, 1936, and she died on November 12 sixty-eight years later, which suggests a tidiness to her time on this earth that her time on this earth certainly did not exhibit. She lived in Alaska, Chile, Mexico, and the American Southwest, loved her sister and loathed her mother, had severe scoliosis and a very large drinking problem. She was forever getting married to cads or addicts and had four sons whom she pretty much raised herself, supporting them through a series of crummy jobs—switchboard operator, ER attendant, cleaning woman. From the ’70s through the ’90s,

Joy Williams wears sunglasses day and night. She does not own a computer and she corresponds by postcard. She can be irascible in interviews (one poor interviewer admitted he “cringe[d]” to publish the interview uncut because of her little digs at him). A real live kook, she is widely admired by writers with even the faintest interest in the avant-garde, and her books have been finalists for major prizes, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, because she is a fiery writer with a sharp humor and a dark energy and because her sentences are weird, funny, and

Ottessa Moshfegh’s narrators exhibit a curious combination of extreme moral nihilism and a desperate need for violent, unforgettable experiences. Eileen, her new and best novel, is a love story told by a young woman who doesn’t understand love and who is leaving behind the only man she really loves, her father. Eileen hates her father, too. He is an abusive alcoholic, who bullies and even assaults his teenage daughter: “In my last years with him my father would occasionally wrap his flat hands around my pencil-thin throat and threaten that he could squeeze the life out of me any time

Few authors remain at once as familiar and excitingly original over the course of a career as Muriel Spark. From book to book, an odd familiarity combines with a scrappy sense of a new beginning. For the neophyte, there’s no bad place to jump in; for the veteran, there’s always something new to explore. In one of the interviews reprinted in Hidden Possibilities, an excellent new collection of critical responses to the Scottish-born author’s work, Spark praises Edna O’Brien for the freshness of her writing; it’s a compliment that could be paid to Spark at any point in her career.