America is weird. Not weird like Shakespeare’s “weyward” sisters, but weird as in meaninglessly incongruous — absurd, but without the moral weight of the absurd. Or at least this is the America of ...

When Fiona Maazel published her first novel, Last Last Chance, in 2008, her frenetic imagination and sharply etched characters earned her a spot on the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 authors ...

For April, I posed a series of questions — with, as always, a few verbal restrictions — to five authors with new books: Julie Buntin (“Marlena”), Fiona Maazel (“A Little More Human”), Olivia Sudjic ...

Lucy Clark is a 30-year-old drug addict (downers, mostly) who grew up in a 7,000-square-foot New York City apartment, whose father killed himself after a deadly strain of plague disappeared from his ...

“A Little More Human,” Fiona Maazel’s third novel, begins in the great tradition of amnesiac noir: “He came to on the back of a horse.” But Maazel is not a hard-boiled hack — she’s a dazzling prose ...

The highest compliment I ever paid an editor was to say that she had changed the way I think about commas. That may not sound like much, but it was revolutionary to me. Commas, punctuation, good ...

Fiona Maazel’s ambitious second novel, “Woke Up Lonely,” is largely about the kind of loneliness experienced by the sort of person so fundamentally damaged and/or unappealing that he or she cannot ...

Fiona Maazel’s second novel, Woke Up Lonely (Graywolf Press), puts a secret agent on the trail of her ex-husband, a cult leader bent on ending loneliness. After proselytizing in North Korea, he goes ...

Fiona Maazel possesses a formidable imagination and considerable linguistic virtuosity. Yet her second novel, “Woke Up Lonely,” a dystopian picaresque featuring a cultlike organization, government ...