Just don't have too much fun without me.

Let's not overthink it: bad year, good music.

Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club is a feat of memory unstuck and blooming. The crude unspooling of time is a dull fact, but Karr counter-intuitively packs a fascinating density into her first book by zeroing in on the events of a mere three years of her childhood spent between Texas and Colorado. She reminds us that what we value about the thing that gets called “truth” has more to do with affect than with verisimilitude

Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage is a book backed into a corner by its author’s pathological indecisiveness, selfishness, cynicism, and oppressively bleak sense of humor. From the outset it’s clear that Dyer has abandonded his goal of writing a critical biography of D.H. Lawrence. Instead, he uses it as an excuse to deliver, at best, a sardonic travelogue that explores issues of literary legacy as well as the brass tacks of writing practice, and at worst a closed-circuit of thought devoid of good-faith inquiry.

Rachel Cusk's Outline is a book so swollen with self-effacement and negative space that reading it can feel like watching someone try and stuff the great blank anonymity of the ocean into a single seashell. Even the wide margins of the pages act like a funnel guiding the words to a blunt point.