Stephanie Wambugu
THERE IS SUCH A GLUT of unhinged female narrators in contemporary fiction that a recognizable microgenre is emerging around these often self-infantilized madwomen. My Year of Rest and Relaxation and its many imitators treat the instability and anhedonia of women as a source of self-deprecating comedy and little else. However enfeebled they have been made […] 
Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures (Riverhead, $29)—his fourth book of fiction—is an ambitious departure from his previous work. The novel takes up timely and fraught questions of representation within a culture industry hostile to idiosyncratic depictions of Black life that do not adhere to predictable narratives. At turns satirical and humane, the novel follows the romantic […]