Lily Meyer

Mutt-Lon's The Blunder, Pina by Titaua Peu, and Thuận's Chinatown all come from different continents and deal, glancingly or in depth, with French colonialism.

The protagonist of Clare-Louise Bennett's novel is a determinedly unfixed and unrooted person who marks time by which writers she has read.

The novel is simultaneously wise and silly, moving and inscrutable. It is also indisputably working hard to be new.

Novelist John Darnielle — also singer-songwriter with the Mountain Goats — has a hero who wants to honor the victims he's writing about but doesn't much like them.

The work is much more like reading a book-length poem than reading a play, though few poems or poetry collections come filled with charming illustrations of trees, dancers, and party-hatted dogs.

Burnout, Anne Helen Petersen argues, will end only with sweeping labor-policy changes — meaning it will end only when we "vote en masse to elect politicians who will agitate for [reform] tirelessly."

"If we fail to take the simple steps to remember and understand our dreams, we are throwing away a gift from our brains without bothering to open it," writes Alice Robb.