Stephen Markley's new novel is an intimate, long look at a single night in New Canaan, a fictional “corn and rust” town set somewhere between central and northeast Ohio.

“The American narrative of a hard-luck individual working hard, doing the right thing, and finding success for it is so deep in me, my life story so tempting as potential evidence for that narrative’s validity,” Sarah Smarsh writes of her own upwardly mobile economic and intellectual trajectory, “that I probably sometimes err on the side of conveying a story in which I’m an individual beating the odds with her own determination.”

William F. Buckley Jr. was more than a prolific writer: He was the brains and coalescing force of a post-World War II philosophy that gradually became known as “conservatism” and which culminated with the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan as president.

I wanted to live my life split open, awake

There is a richness to “Roma” that will likely take multiple viewings to absorb. Every gesture is revealing; every image is a window.

Dubus was an irascible, loyal, loving, smoking, hard-drinking, hard-punching, tender man, who demanded much of himself and others.