Victory City

"Later that month, look out for Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X. I love Lacey’s writing; her last novel Pew was an excellently eerie and ambiguous story from smalltown America (I described it back in summer 2020 as “Rachel Cusk meets Shirley Jackson”), and this looks like it could be her best yet. In it, the widow of a subversive artist digs into the history of her late partner, against a backdrop of an alternate America, in which the South split from the North in the wake of World War II , before coming back together in uneasy reunification. Sometimes it’s easier to look at the tensions of the present day through a speculative prism. Also of note: In April, Curtis Sittenfeld (author of the intense boarding school novel Prep , among other things) will publish her latest, Romantic Comedy , in which a female comedy sketch writer falls for an attractive male pop star in what is presumably a knowing nod towards (and gender reversal of) Pete Davidson’s romantic travails . Brandon Taylor will release his second novel, The Late Americans , in May—a follow-up to the Booker-shortlisted Real Life . It follows a year in the life of a loose circle of friends and lovers in Iowa City as they come together and fall apart; Taylor has an acute eye and a sharp pen, and is an excellent chronicler of contemporary American life."