Have you ever seen someone drink a can of beer in one hit and then crush the can? That would be an apt metaphor for the way I consumed Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins, a wry and perceptive drama about a dysfunctional family which I couldn’t get enough of. I also tore through Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, although I felt increasingly alienated by the narrative voice and ultimately a little soiled by the reading experience.

Almost a decade ago my husband bought me a gift subscription to The Paris Review which he has faithfully renewed every year. I am not a huge fan of their short fiction—the editors seem to have a proclivity for stories which tend towards the sordid and/or perplexing—but their ‘Art of Fiction’ interviews are almost always insightful and thought-provoking. I tend to dip into the journal over a period of a few weeks and one of the things I love most about it is that the least promising-looking offerings turn out to be those which resonate most with me. This edition (Winter 2012) has been no exception: I particularly enjoyed a conversation between John Jeremiah Sullivan and Elif Batuman on false starts in writing, from the proceedings of the First Annual Norwegian-American Literary festival, as well as Tim Parks’ intriguing story ‘The Tangling Point.’