Mona Simpson's latest novel unfurls into a stirring cartography of the impacts of a mother’s deteriorating mental health on her three children.

“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.”

Donald Hall tries to place a seal upon his own literary legacy by remixing his best origin stories and famous friendships.