If We Were Villains

When my book club recently selected M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains, I was initially hesitant. I hadn’t read any Shakespeare since college, and wasn’t sure if I’d enjoy a novel so heavily influenced by his work. I was pleasantly surprised when I was drawn in right away by the characters, seven actors in their final year at an elite performing arts college. As they immerse themselves in Shakespeare’s tragedies, the lines between reality and performance begin to blur. When one of the students dies mysteriously after a Halloween-night production of Macbeth, the rest, now suspects, must confront the roles they play both on and off the stage. Oliver, often typecast as the “sidekick,” narrates the story 10 years later. The plot deftly mirrors the thematic elements of the plays the group is performing, including Romeo and Juliet and King Lear—exploring ambition, betrayal and revenge. Even if you’re not a Shakespeare buff, the connections between the characters’ lives and the plays they perform are easy to grasp. If you do love the Bard, the parallels will be icing on the cake.

—Katherine Klockenkemper, Subscriptions

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

In Lorrie Moore’s beguiling 2023 novel, I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, a man and his dead ex-girlfriend take a road trip, he desperate to understand her suicide, she slowly decomposing (while telling stories and singing) in the passenger seat. Nested in this story are letters from Elizabeth—a Civil War-era mistress of a boardinghouse that has “lost its spank”—to her sister, long dead at the time of her writing. Elizabeth is a crackerjack writer: formal yet irreverent, self-effacing and self-aware. She is sympathetic to abolition, the poor and weary soldiers, and not opposed to mischief. She writes of a “handsome lodger” who is “dapper as a finch” and “keen to relieve me of my spinsterhood.” But after she hears of the assassination of President Lincoln, she starts to see her lodger in a different light. Moore suspends Elizabeth’s story for much of the novel, and readers may yearn to get back to the boardinghouse. It’s no surprise that Moore, a master of pacing and timing, delivers on Elizabeth’s story with an unexpected, delightful convergence of the two narratives.

—Erica Ciccarone, Associate Editor

The Blind Assassin

The Blind Assassin opens with Iris Griffen recounting the death of her 25-year-old sister, Laura, who drove her car off a bridge while, as Iris makes sure to note, wearing white gloves, as if “washing her hands of me. Of all of us.” Through prose interspersed with newspaper clippings and excerpts from The Blind Assassin—the posthumous novel that launches Laura into notoriety—Margaret Atwood’s puzzle of a book reels us in to an enigmatic life that is dotted by tragedy and death. However, it’s a true testament to Atwood’s genre-spanning talent that perhaps the most enthralling element is the pulp science fiction story told within the eponymous novel-within-a-novel. This third layer of the story explores Sakiel-Norn, a grand city on the planet Zycron that is famous for producing carpets woven by child slaves who inevitably go blind from the work. This loss of sight makes them highly prized assassins. Atwood is the rare jack-of-all-trades, master of everything: She dances effortlessly between the realistic and the speculative, while fashioning a narrative that is not only suspenseful and exciting, but also contemplative—an ability that elevated other works such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake to cultural phenomenon status, and is on full display here in The Blind Assassin.

—Yi Jiang, Associate Editor

A Tale for the Time Being

If you keep a journal, you may be familiar with an occasional prickling feeling —a feeling that makes you wonder, what would someone think if they read this? The act of writing seems to suppose a connection with an audience, even writing that you never intend to share. In Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, novelist Ruth feels a powerful connection to a stranger when she discovers a diary washed up on the shore of her home on an island in British Columbia. In alternating chapters, we read from the diary, which belonged to Nao, a high schooler from Tokyo, and hear about Ruth’s life with her husband, Oliver. As she reads, Ruth becomes increasingly, desperately concerned for Nao. The teenager’s father is deeply depressed, and her classmates grotesquely bully her. She’s clearly suffering. Was the diary carried to Ruth by the 2011 tsunami in Japan? Or was it abandoned before that, and if so, what happened to Nao? Ozeki incorporates Buddhist spirituality in layers both explicit and subtle, meaning there’s always more to uncover in this complicated book.

—Phoebe Farrell-Sherman, Associate Editor