Over the winter break, I fell madly in love with a couple of bold, fierce, delicious books, each of which kept interrupting my expectations while remaining compulsively addictive, as in, everyone-go-away-no-I-don’t-want-to-eat-or-work-or-do-anything-but-read-this-book. I would fall into them and leave behind, for a brief blissful time, the fragile, enraging political (and medical and economic) situation. Fiction so relentless, so surprising that it becomes its own world. Some of that is the subject matter, but some of it is the sentences. As I read, I thought, vaguely, that they were interrupting linearity, poetically, but now that I look at them more closely, that doesn’t seem to be what they’re up to at all.