Pew

"One of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists , Catherine Lacey ( Nobody Is Ever Missing ), is releasing her fourth book, Pew – a creepy tale set in a small Southern town, in which a stranger of indistinguishable gender and ethnicity pitches up in the local church, and is soon hearing the confessions of the town’s residents as they prepare for their ominously-named Forgiveness Festival: Rachel Cusk meets Shirley Jackson. A modern day fable about what we project onto others. It’s out now in the UK, and will appear in July in the US. I’m also very keen on the American writer Kate Zambreno’s Drifts : a wise and fragmentary autofictional work. In it, a novelist working on a never-ending book sweats over her journals but after seven years – like Kafka and Rilke in their time, as she notes – finds herself disheartened by how little she has to show for it. It reminded me of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation , specifically her protagonist’s obsession with ‘art monsters’ – those one-track-minded geniuses who forsake all else on their path to glory. Drifts also has perhaps my favourite ever epigraph (César Aira: “It should be remembered that the bulk of the work they were doing was preliminary: sketches, notes, jottings.”) which I have pinned up above my desk, for solace on my less productive days."