THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (October 15, 2023): This week’s issue features a fabulous historical novel, the Janet Malcolm-like account of an Australian murder trial, a sprightly history of the Oxford English Dictionary, a homage to “The Haunting of Hill House”, historical fiction, thrillers, crime novels, romance, horror & Gothic fiction, science fiction & fantasy.)

A Fitting — and Frightening — Homage to ‘The Haunting of Hill House’

Apparitions, black hares and time warps festoon the pages of Elizabeth Hand’s “A Haunting on the Hill,” set in the same moldering mansion as Shirley Jackson’s classic horror novel.

The Wife Has Committed Murder but It’s the Husband Who Scares Her Lawyer

In Marie NDiaye’s new novel, “Vengeance Is Mine,” a woman is haunted by a decades-old trauma she feels, but cannot quite remember.

The book cover of “Vengeance Is Mine” is designed like a ripped sheet of paper. The image features a blank surface with a triangular cutout running down from the top. The layer underneath the tear is red and reveals the author’s name and the novel’s title.

By Lovia Gyarkye

VENGEANCE IS MINE, by Marie NDiaye. Translated by Jordan Stump.

The characters in Marie NDiaye’s novels are an unsettling brood. They fret and pace around their homes, tormented by their pasts. Their minds trap and trick them. A daughter can’t shake memories of her mother’s murder; a man gropes for the truth about his imprisonment in a deserted vacation town; a chef pursues culinary perfection at any cost; a woman — reminded of a friend, a schoolteacher or was it her mother? — fatally chases an apparition in green.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (October 1, 2023): This week’s issue features the biography “Larry McMurtry: A Life”….

Larry McMurtry, a Critter of the American West Who Rejected Its Mythos

This black-and-white photo of the novelist Larry McMurtry shows him from a slight angle, seated and looking pensive. He wears heavy glasses and has one hand braced against his mouth and chin; his other arm is bent over his head and the sleeves of his white button-down shirt are rolled up past his elbows.

Tracy Daugherty’s new biography is the first comprehensive account of the prolific novelist who brought us “Lonesome Dove,” “The Last Picture Show” and more.

By Dwight Garner

LARRY McMURTRY: A Life, by Tracy Daugherty

When the art critic Dave Hickey learned that Tracy Daugherty was writing a biography of his friend Larry McMurtry (all three men are Texans), he said to Daugherty: “Knowing Larry, it’s going to be a real episodic book.” Episodic this biography is. It’s also vastly entertaining.

McMurtry, the prolific author of “The Last Picture Show,” “Terms of Endearment” and “Lonesome Dove,” was a demythologizer of the American West who appeared to live in several registers at once.