Readings from New Novels

In Alyson Hagy’s Scribe, with the country under civil war, a woman who barters letter-writing for supplies receives an unusual request for a letter from a man with hidden motives. Maria Dahvana Headley’s The Mere Wife: A Novel is a modern retelling of the literary classic Beowulf, set in American suburbia. Aaron Thier’s The World Is a Narrow Bridge is a darkly comic road novel about a millennial couple facing the ultimate question: how to live and love in an age of catastrophe.