The Compound, by Aisling Rawle (Random House). In this delightfully absorbing novel, an isolated house in the middle of a menacing desert landscape serves as the backdrop of a reality-TV competition. There, a cast of attractive young men and women are recorded with hidden cameras as they complete \u201ctasks\u201d\u2014some innocuous, some sadistic\u2014concocted by the show\u2019s producers. They also pursue romances; if, at sunrise, they are not in bed with a member of the opposite sex, they are eliminated. The novel\u2019s narrator, Lily, convinced that the outside world offers her only \u201cdrudgery, day after day,\u201d resolves to win. As the show progresses, the book morphs into a potent examination of self-objectification, of the existential tedium of work, and of the disorientation produced by living in a world where what is genuine and what is performance are difficult to disentangle.<\/p>\n
Never Flinch, by Stephen King (Scribner). This propulsive novel follows a police detective and a private eye\u2014Holly Gibney, a character who appears in several other King novels\u2014as they search for a killer who has announced that he will slay fourteen people to avenge the death of a man who was murdered in prison after having been framed. The investigators\u2019 hunt occurs at the same time that an outspoken feminist activist discovers she is being pursued by a stalker while on a national book tour, for which she has employed Gibney as a bodyguard. As the stories begin to converge, King\u2019s narrative can sometimes seem too tidy, but his pacing remains unmatched.<\/p>\n
Illustration by Ben Hickey<\/p>\n
Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Compound, by Aisling Rawle (Random House). In this delightfully absorbing novel, an isolated house in the middle…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8837,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[223,88,1766,8807],"class_list":{"0":"post-8836","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-magazine","11":"tag-textaboveleftsmallwithrule"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8836"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8836\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}