Christian Lorentzen

Of all​ the novels responding to the Trump presidency, Richard Powers’s Bewilderment may come closest to pure propaganda. Set in a slightly worse and slightly more technologically advanced version of the present – popular adjustments in recent fiction – Bewilderment takes aim at the administration’s xenophobia and persecution of foreigners, its anti-science and...

Sally​ Rooney’s emergence in recent years as the avatar of literary success and its online scapegoat is not unrelated to the content of her novels. Normal People begins with its protagonists, Marianne and Connell, comparing their grades at secondary school and ends with Connell getting onto a graduate creative writing programme. In the first pages of Conversations with Friends, the...

To cook crack​ you need cocaine, water, baking soda, a heat source (microwave, stove, torch, cigarette lighter) and a spoon or a jar of the right thickness. Disregard the occasional splintered jar or finger burn, and the advantages of cooking for yourself are mostly to do with customer service. You’re less likely to get ripped off or have a gun pointed at your head: powder cocaine...

‘Above all,’ Douglas Stuart writes in the acknowledgments to Shuggie Bain, his first novel, ‘I owe everything to memories of my mother and her struggle.’ The American cover has a black and white photograph of a boy and a woman in bed, their foreheads touching in a maternal embrace. (On the British cover, a boy sits on a post that looks not unlike a cross.)...

It’s fitting for the Trump presidency to end under a cloud of lawsuits, recount requests and accusations of ballot dumping. The spectre of illegitimacy has defined the last decade of American politics. Birtherism and Russiagate have now yielded to the notion that votes can’t properly be counted, that the election system is corrupt, that whoever becomes president may be a thief. As its avatar and publicist, Trump is responsible for this disorder, and the fever is worse on the right, but only a few months ago liberals were pointing to the apparently routine removal and rearrangement of mailboxes as a sign of chicanery afoot. Trump has a way of infecting his opponents with his vices, but they are never as potent secondhand. ‘Lock them up’ is frighteningly rousing when the crowd takes it up at a rally. It doesn’t have such a galvanising effect in the form of a lengthy piece about Trump’s post-presidential legal prospects in the New Yorker.