Christian Lorentzen

Joe Biden seems to have got into politics simply because he could: for the fuck of it, not out of any ethical commitment or bracing ambition. Unlike most recent Democrat and Republican nominees for president he isn’t a meritocrat (Dukakis, the Clintons, Obama) or an aristocrat (the Bushes, Gore, Kerry), or the son of a powerful father (McCain, Romney, Trump). Not being an egghead is his biggest asset in the fight v. Trump. With his famous love for ‘the poorly educated’, Trump often seems to be campaigning on behalf of those Hillary Clinton called the ‘deplorables’ and against the figures of the teacher’s pet and the goody two shoes. (His Democratic rivals have embodied these types but in a way he sought to paint as phony: Clinton, Trump claimed, was secretly corrupt and deserved to be locked up; Obama, according to the birther libel he flogged, was an illegitimate president because secretly foreign.) Little in their actual political records differentiates Biden from Clinton, but he can more persuasively tell an autoworker that his industry will return to the glories of the 1940s.

J​eanine Cummins’s​ American Dirt (Tinder, £14.99) begins with a massacre. Fourteen people are killed at a birthday barbecue: the family – husband, mother, cousins etc – of Lydia Pérez and her eight-year-old son, Luca, who are hiding in the bathroom. One of the three assailants uses the toilet, unaware that mother and son, the actual targets of the...

Deborah Eisenberg​ spent the summer of 1963 at a school for labour organisers and civil rights activists in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. She was 17. ‘It was a proudly Klan county,’ she told an interviewer, ‘and we all ended up briefly in jail.’ On her return to Chicago, she was surprised to find that nobody believed her stories of racist cops and police...

Edward Snowden​ was born in the summer of 1983. Around this time, the US Defence Department split its computer network into MILNET, an internal military branch, and a public branch, which we now know as the internet. Home computers were becoming pervasive; the Commodore 64 was selling in the millions. One day Snowden’s father brought one home, connected it to the TV set, and the...

The wild​, dark and very funny novels of Sam Lipsyte are governed by a certain fatalism: a nominal meritocracy produces a class of super-qualified and clever people who are nevertheless shut out of society’s higher-status zones. The world is split between sellouts and burnouts – guess who takes the lion’s share? ‘Let me stand on the rooftop of my reckoning,’...