In Half as Happy, his second book of short stories, Gregory Spatz plays around, as his title suggests, with ideas of halves and doubles. His characters live with a constant sense of incompleteness, as if there is always someone...

I recently encountered the useful literary term “dirty realism.” It was coined by Bill Buford, former editor of Granta magazine, to describe American literature of the 1980s, including authors like Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff,...

What a stunning debut from Francesca Segal. A 32-year-old first-time novelist has no business writing such a sophisticated, pitch-perfect homage to Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Her strategy is that of Zadie Smith in On...