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“... Catherine Lacey’s​ last book, Certain American States (2018), a short story collection, began with an epigraph from Annie Baker’s play Circle Mirror Transformation:LAUREN: Hey. Um. This is kind of weird – but do you ever wonder how many times your life is gonna end?(Another silence.)SCHULTZ: Uh … I’m not sure I know what you –LAUREN: Like how many people you’re … like how many times your life is gonna totally change and then, like, start all over again? And you’ll feel like what happened before wasn’t real and what’s happening now is actually …(She trails off ...”

“... 0.069 per cent of a day is making to the meaning of her life? C.M. Lucca, the writer created by Catherine Lacey to narrate her fourth novel, Biography of X, at least has the guts to admit the problem. Lucca is also the author of a book called Biography of X, as well as being the widow of the polymathic artist called X (1945-96) who is its subject, a ...”

“... social problems, but while many recent authors – among them Ottessa Moshfegh, Halle Butler and Catherine Lacey – have attempted to evoke the depths of hopelessness plumbed in the last decade or two, Flattery’s nihilism is uniquely uncynical; she actually seems to believe that nothing matters. The beautiful 24-year-old narrator in Moshfegh’s My ...”

“... great work dramatically revised our thinking about the bloat King. Three years later appeared Lacey Baldwin Smith’s rich and racy study of the King’s character, taken from the viewpoint of old age and subtitled ‘The Mask of Royalty’: here Tudor history and modern psychology made slightly strange but nevertheless exciting bedfellows. Both books are ...”

“... entrance, and Jane’s is one of them. She was beheaded in 1542, with Henry VIII’s fifth queen, Catherine Howard. She was one of Catherine’s ladies, and for reasons which remain inaccessible to us, she had helped the dizzy little person carry on a love affair with a courtier, Thomas Culpepper. She passed on letters and ...”

“... called If You Really Want to Hear about It: Writers on J.D. Salinger and His Work, edited by Catherine Crawford.) There is no brisker way into the Salinger story than Morrill’s portrait: she is a fan, but she knows how to snap the ruler down. Salinger’s feel for the religions of the East, she writes, ‘is about what you’d have if you minored in ...”