Sam Sacks

2 weeks ago | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

The author of the Patrick Melrose novels follows his career-long concern with the workings of the brain into an era of biotech advances. Edward St. Aubyn’s five-book cycle, the Patrick Melrose novels, published between 1992 and 2011 and now widely recognized as a classic of British literature, covers a lot of territory in the chronicle of its magnetically messed-up hero.

3 weeks ago | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

Plus Rickey Fayne’s ‘The Devil Three Times’ and Vivek Shanbhag’s ‘Sakina’s Kiss.’“In stories,” thinks the main character of Juan José Millás’s “Only Smoke,” “the extraordinary and the ordinary merge like the materials of an alloy in which it then becomes impossible to separate the original constituent parts.” The Spanish novelist is one of my favorite practitioners of this narrative alchemy.

4 weeks ago | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

The real-life case of a Dutch soldier’s amnesia—and the dispute over his identity—is the basis for a tale of grief set in the aftermath of World War I. They were called les morts vivants, or the living dead. These were survivors of the battlefields of World War I who were so severely shell-shocked that they no longer knew who they were. Some were catatonic, some schizophrenic.

1 month ago | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

Plus ‘The Deserters’ by Mathias Énard and ‘Glass Century’ by Ross Barkan. Graham Swift offers the title of his third collection of short stories, “Twelve Post-War Tales,” in an egalitarian spirit. The characters include ex-soldiers and war orphans but also teachers, miners, maids and other working-class Britons who know of battlefields only from textbooks and newsreels. Even these civilians, suggests Mr. Swift, have been shaped by war’s carnage. Everyone lives in a postwar world.

1 month ago | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

Plus Vijay Khurana’s ‘The Passenger Seat’ and Osamu Dazai’s ‘No One Knows.’The serial novel has not had a significant role in American publishing for nearly a century, but lately there have been stirrings of a revival. Creative artists, along with journalists and pundits, have begun to migrate to subscription-based media platforms, most notably Substack.