It’s very difficult, I thought to myself, to know what we’re really like inside.

Pleased to find, after finishing, two absolutely stellar authors endorsing this precious and precise little instrument. Maggie Nelson, of the wonderful Bluets, is “utterly entranced” by Ginzburg’s “mysterious directness, her salutary ability to lay things bare.” Calvino puts it more directly: “Natalia Ginzburg doesn’t play.”

This is what love is like, the fray and the freight. There is no way of knowing what is in another’s head, except of course by firing a bullet between their eyes. The White Lotus Season 2 in 90 pages. Simple genius, ravaging relatability. Regrettably, I know and am every person here described. I have thought the same thoughts, feared the same. And not just the same as the narrator, but the same as her husband, as her husband’s former love. None are caricature — a near miracle considering the genre and format. Clear life. Ultra HD. It appears Anne Serre has an Italian aunt, and I mean that as the highest compliment.

Nice to see Smith experiment. And in such wide variety! Sci-fi, fantasy, essay, all added on to her traditional lit fic, all passable at worst and at best rife with her trademark wit and razor-sharp mode of observation.

Pain is the least symbolic thing there is. So what, as an author, can be done? Language has its limits, and not even this wide a net can quite conceive to catch it all, so vast and unliterary a subject. Nor can pain be altogether avoided, swept in at the corners in trace amounts. Bundle of fragments, grand union.

Highlights: “Words and Music,” “Escape from New York,” “Big Week,” “Kelso Deconstructed”