Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels Real Life and The Late Americans.
Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel, Creation Lake, shuttles between the story of Sadie Smith, a spy-for-hire tasked with observing Le Moulin, a radical environmentalist commune in rural southwest France, and the intercepted emails of Bruno Lacombe, a cave-dwelling local eccentric who serves as the Moulinards’ mentor and spiritual icon. You might expect this marriage between cool...
Zola’s naturalism not only holds that one can shape and change one’s fate, but that it is a moral necessity to do so, at least in the extra-literary dimension that is life. For his characters, things are a bit bleaker.
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