Jessica Olin

Many of​ the contributors to Meghan Daum’s new anthology once thought they’d have children. For some, it seemed ‘an interesting future possibility’, like ‘joining the Peace Corps’. Rosemary Mahoney ‘used to imagine what my children would look like, and those pleasant imaginings made me love them so much that when I finally snapped to I would...

In September 2005, the New York Times published an article about female students at elite colleges who saw futures for themselves as ‘stay-at-home moms’. The author, Louise Story, had conducted a study at Yale in which many of those interviewed said that when they had children, they planned to cut back on work or stop working altogether. While administrators seemed alarmed by the...

‘This book will save your life’: it’s a bold claim. In A.M. Homes’s new novel, Richard Novak has systematically removed himself from the world of human relationships. In the wake of a failed marriage, he moved to Los Angeles and set up a perfectly ordered existence. He stopped going to work years ago; instead, each morning he checks the market while exercising on his...

Depictions of the American teenager are not exactly scarce. Over the last few years we’ve seen queen bees, mean girls, freaks, geeks and dorks of all kinds. What we have not seen is someone like Lee Fiora, the reluctant heroine of Curtis Sittenfeld’s first novel, Prep, which is a thoughtful, measured account of life at a top East Coast boarding-school. In a field dominated by...

Jhumpa Lahiri’s first book, Interpreter of Maladies (2000), was a collection of spare short stories, whose characters, many of them Indian, exist in a sort of permanent exile, living in America but never fully belonging to it. In her sprawling first novel, The Namesake, she revisits this territory and attempts to move beyond it.

The book opens onto a dingy domestic scene: Ashima...