OH WILLIAM! By Elizabeth Strout

From the author of Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton comes Oh William!—a novel continuum of Lucy’s life as a famous novelist and her strange relationship dance with her first husband, William, to whom she is divorced but connected through their grown daughters and the embers of a disquieting love that has never died out. William is the first person Lucy calls after the death of her second husband. While grieving, Lucy dives deep into her childhood memories, ultimately understanding why she married William and why they divorced. Strout captures and illuminates the solitary moments of grief and loneliness like no other novelist out there. 

Favorite line(s): I think how when I was in college, and I lived for a year off-campus—except that I was mostly at William’s apartment—how I would walk by a house on my way to school and I noticed that the woman of this house had children, and I would see her through the windows, and she was pretty—sort of, I think—and at holidays her dining room table would be filled with food, and the children, almost grown, would be sitting around the table, and her husband—I assumed it was her husband—would be sitting at one end of the table, and I would walk by these windows and think, That is what I will be. This is what I will have.

But I was a writer.

And that is a vocation. And I think how the only person who ever taught me anything about writing said, “Stay out of debt and don’t have children.”

But I wanted those children more than I wanted my work. And I had them. But I need my work as well.

FIVE TUESDAYS IN WINTER: STORIES by Lily King

I love Lily King. I’ve met her, and she’s exactly how she writes with an open, curious, and effervescent style. With deft precision, King stands likable with the unlikeable characters in these ten inventive stories that show us the foibles of characters too afraid to speak the truth. The settings give off a whiff of once brighter monied days. King shows us the cracks in the façade of east coast summer homes where the children are pawned off to babysitters and lesser-known relatives. The marriages implode, and the children become churlish. But among the painful tales are the tender stories of kindness and the longing for connection. 

Favorite line(s): We went to a candy factory out of town on a hill—everything was on a hill or nestled in a valley there—on a Thursday afternoon. Three old ladies in plastic caps gave us a tour and we ate warm dark chocolate nonpareils and soft peanut butter cups from a brown bag on some playground swings. All the facts of my childhood enthralled him not because they had happened to me but because they had happened to Wes. Wes had put a bit of a spell on him. To him, Wes had crawled out from under his rock and appeared at the bar with tarred teeth and BO and riffing on everything from Hume to Hendricks, gathering the young and the old, the honest and the corrupt, the dead broke and the slumming elite.  

MOUTH TO MOUTH by Antoine Wilson

The unnamed narrator, a little-known author, is stuck at JFK airport because of a flight delay. He runs into a former classmate at the gate who is booked on the same flight to Frankfort. They hang out together in the first-class lounge where Jeff Cook, the classmate our narrator barely knew, begins the story—the retelling of a confession “loaded with fateful encounters, hidden agendas, shrouded identities, adulterous betrayals, and brushes with death.” Cook recounts the events that happened to him before and after saving a man who was drowning in the Pacific off Santa Monica beach. Cook says, “I wanted him to be good, though, I wanted to feel that I had done a good thing not only for him but for all the people he came in contact with.” No spoiler alerts here. With its sharp dialogue and acute behavioral observations, Mouth to Mouth swallowed this reader whole. 

Favorite line(s): Our relationship developed under a cloud of paranoia. We ordered in rather than going out. When we did meet out in the world, we avoided anywhere that we might bump into anyone we knew. This might have seemed like overkill, but it was also fun, one of the games we played. A relationship needs its games—if there’s no sense of play, there’s only desperation, fear of being alone. I loved that we had a game, known only to us. Sometimes we rented movies, but more often, we talked. Since I was working full-time and she was on a student’s schedule, we usually ended up at my place, Brad Pitt’s house. 

SPEEDBOAT by Renata Adler

Speedboat is a ride like no other. Published in 1976, Adler’s quirky novel about Jen Fain, a journalist in Washington, D.C., who chronicles her life in fragmentary travel-like vignettes about writers and politics and sometimes love interests. Written in the first-person, Speedboat conveys what it was like to be a female intellectual who “ruminates on the ephemera.” There are shifts in time without plot or much character development, but the observations pinch and sting in all the right places.

Favorite line(s): The radical intelligence in the moderate position is the only place where the center holds. Or so it seems.