Richard Joseph

One sunny afternoon, in Lynne Kutsukake’s The Art of Vanishing, two art students take their sketchbooks to a park in Tokyo. Akemi is a fastidious realist, best at illustrating anatomical diagrams for medical textbooks, and so she focuses on the tiny insects and plant life on the ground. Sayako — impetuous, romantic, with a fondness for Caravaggio — is unimpressed with her friend’s pedestrian…

In “Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel,” written in 1949, Raymond Chandler advised that “a really good detective never gets married.” Chandler was always careful not to entangle his best-known protagonist, Philip Marlowe — the star of seven novels, including The Big Sleep, from 1939 — in any sort of long-term romance. He believed such abiding affairs sapped vital tension from mysteries by introducing a type of suspense “antagonistic to the detective’s struggle to solve the problem.” This philosophy has long been a guiding principle for American noir…

Anyone who turns to reading to get away from their screen might be tempted to give up entirely on contemporary literary fiction. The internet — perhaps the greatest threat to the novel in the attention economy — has also been, recently, its greatest obsession. Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking about This replicates in its lyrical fragments the semi-conscious haze of scrolling through a social media…