Sarah Resnick

Helen Oyeyemi’s​ latest novel, Parasol against the Axe, opens with a playful monologue from its narrator, the city of Prague. Prague has recently found its way – ‘who knows how’ – into a WhatsApp group ‘set up as a safe space for sharing complaints about the capital city of Czechia’. ‘Some of the incidents referred to had taken place many years...

Stories about the oil sands tend to fall into one of two categories. Either they emphasise economic prosperity, describing the well-paid jobs and the money flowing into impoverished areas, or they focus on environmental catastrophe: forests razed by vast strip mines, tailings ponds filled with toxic sludge, polluted waterways and, in the surrounding communities, elevated rates of cancer and disease. Kate Beaton’s Ducks can’t be slotted neatly into either.

‘Do I want to have children?’ For a woman in her mid-thirties, the question can be vexed. It’s not that she suppressed the question in her twenties, but she was occupied with other things – how to earn a living, for one. Then, in her thirties, a sense of urgency kicks in. The question, inasmuch as it refers to a pregnancy with her own genetic material, can no longer be...

Thirteen people​ have died so far this year in the custody of New York City’s Department of Correction. All of them were being held on Rikers Island. Herman Diaz, 52, choked to death on an orange; several other detainees tried to revive him but no guard came to his aid. Dashawn Carter, 25, hanged himself two days after returning to Rikers from a state psychiatric hospital. George...

The Candy House, Jennifer Egan’s companion to her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), appears to be part of the trend for fiction premised on interventions – computational, pharmaceutical, viral – in human memory. It’s also something of an anomaly. In A Visit from the Goon Squad, the characters stand on the precipice of the digital age and...