In the third book of the “Wendy” series, the titular character remains young and muddled, ambitious and self-defeating, horny and depressed. But she is also stretching toward adulthood.
One feels deranged reading Samantha Harvey’s “The Shapeless Unease,” and part of the book’s disturbia may derive from its refusal to stay confined between its own covers.
Wang Fang, in her “Wuhan Diary,” chronicled the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic, writing that state prevarications “have transformed Wuhan into a city of blood and tears filled with endless misery.”
A sparkling new translation makes for a fine entry point into Heinrich von Kleist’s passionate, grotesque, hysterical, and deeply strange body of work.
Because monumental matters are mundane in Mantel’s trilogy, the mundane feels monumental—an aspect that harmonizes with the heightened sensory awareness that seems to mark life in quarantine.