![]() Maddie Crumīen Lerner’s return to poetry begins with an “Index of Themes” both intimate and grand, including “poems / about stars and / how they are erased by street / lights,” and “Poems about you, prose / poems.” In the decade and some since he last published a book of poems, he’s written, among other projects, three increasingly personal novels his most recent, The Topeka School, draws from his high-school debate years and his parents’ study of psychology, of babble, of talking without really speaking. “One of the quickest ways to turn a young life into a data point.” One of the most affecting ways to reverse that harm: to tell a story. In “Let Women Doubt,” a woman takes a trip to Paris that she’d bought as a gift for her brother, who overdosed. In “A Sheltered Woman,” postpartum difficulties are narrated through the eyes of a childless nurse. In her latest book’s titular story, Wednesday’s Child, the narrator wonders whether she shouldn’t have introduced her daughter to a melancholic writer so soon. But these moments of genuine and surprising closeness - between estranged friends, between 19th-century writers and their contemporary readers, between care workers and new mothers, between mothers and their tragically lost children - appear throughout. Li’s career has spanned several mediums since then: a memoir of her life as a reader and several novels, including last year’s PEN/Faulkner-winning The Book of Goose. In the title story of her early collection, “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl,” Yiyun Li brought together two characters who hadn’t realized they needed each other by chance or fate, they clicked into a simple, unromantic intimacy, not as a family but as a more original and less painful arrangement. In The Fraud, they’re as diverse, strange, and hopeful as any of us. ![]() Zadie Smith has said her new novel is an attempt to really understand who the Victorians were. But Eliza eventually gets involved in the media circus around the case, striking up an uneasy acquaintanceship with its star witness, Andrew Bogle, a formerly enslaved man. (In one of the novel’s funniest bits, Smith reprints a chunk of text from a real-life Ainsworth novel, an unreadable nest of description.) Eliza doesn’t have much respect for him either - she’s too smart for most of the people around her, especially William’s new wife, who’s obsessed with a trial involving a poor man who claims to be the lost heir to a massive fortune. ![]() William, her cousin by marriage, briefly outsold Charles Dickens, but his real talent is in his naïve sociability - even with writers who secretly, and sometimes openly, laugh at his incredibly tedious books. Eliza Touchet has been working as a maid for William Harrison Ainsworth, a novelist whose popularity is in serious decline, for decades. ![]()
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