Emily Witt

In 1996, a company called Purdue Pharmaceutical launched a new opiate painkiller called OxyContin. At a party celebrating its release to the public, Richard Sackler, a scion of the family that owns the company and its senior vice president of sales, made exuberant predictions about its success. ‘The launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition,’ he said, according to a lawsuit recently filed against Purdue. ‘The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white …’

Early​ in The Mars Room, a bus full of prisoners is being transported upstate from Los Angeles County on Interstate 5, which bisects California’s Central Valley. The bus passes by the stench of a cattle farm and follows a truck full of turkeys headed to slaughter. The valley is blighted, ‘a brutal, flat, machined landscape, with a strange lemonade light, thick with drifting...

The title of The Girls is obviously close to the title of the HBO series Girls. And this scene, of young people whose expressions of sexual fulfilment parrot certain tropes of internet porn, is the kind of scene we see in Girls too. The author of The Girls, Emma Cline, is the same generation as Lena Dunham, the creator of Girls, and reading The Girls, as when I have watched Girls, I felt pained by the theory of girlhood they propose.

I wanted to go​ to Burning Man because I saw the huge festival in the Nevada desert as the epicentre of the three things that most interested me in 2013: sexual experimentation, psychedelic drugs and futurism. But everyone said Burning Man was over, that it was spoiled. The event, which requires those who attend to bring their own food, water and shelter and dispose of their own...

The narrator of The Woman Upstairs is Nora Eldridge, and from the start she describes herself as something of a non-entity. ‘I’m neither fat nor thin, tall nor short, blonde nor brunette, neither pretty nor plain.’ She’s 42 and ‘neither married nor divorced, but single. What they used to call a spinster, but don’t anymore, because it implies that you’re dried up and none of us wants to be that.’ Spinsters, in the old novels, are sexless, meddlesome and prissy. These days, what they used to call a spinster is a fearsome spectre, someone to avoid.