In her seventh novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, Margot Livesey updates Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre so smoothly and skillfully that you’d barely even notice.

Our latest Journal of the Week, The Georgia Review, has been committed to storytelling since its founding in 1947. Heading toward its 258th issue, the journal’s careful curating of stories, essays, poetry, reviews and art has helped it survive the test of time—and flourish.

A finalist for the National Book Award, Julie Otsuka’s innovative novel The Buddha in the Attic pushes the bounds of narrative form with a collective narrator and a resistance to fixed fates. By inviting the reader to consider what could have happened, instead of what did, Otsuka makes her complicit in the fate of the story’s mail-order-brides.

Little jaunt to the underworld? Don’t forget your passport. The second installment in Lev Grossman’s Fillory series, The Magician King, continues to play with realist fantasy and the right amount of irony to meld the two. Quentin and his pals provide a sly and subversive fairy tale for grown-ups, with a caution: be careful what you wish for. You might get it.

At age 53, Joan Leegant published her first book, the critically heralded story collection, An Hour in Paradise. With her debut novel, Wherever You Go, she has continued to prove her presence as a preeminent Jewish-American writer. Jody Lisberger taught fiction at Harvard with Joan Leegant, and their interview explores questions of structure, identity, listening to your characters and the treatment of ethical issues in fiction.

Ever feel like reading genre without, you know, knowing what to expect? Cam Terwilliger on why Percival Everett’s Assumption—one volume, three mystery novellas—will kick your [ahem] assumptions to the curb.

Popular Argentinian writer Eduardo Sacheri has said that “writing is a special way to read.” In this review of The Secret in Their Eyes, Denise Delgado explores the similarities and differences between Sacheri’s first novel and the Academy-Award winning film adaptation he helped write.

In her eighth book—and fourth novel—Leah Hager Cohen explores the dynamics of grief and mourning with her trademark curious mind and loving attention to detail. Steven Wingate and the author discuss “otherness,” withholding judgment on characters, and the importance of ritual.

In his powerful debut novel, The Art of Fielding, N+1 co-founder/editor Chad Harbach taps into the ephemeral baseball consciousness through a four-person starting rotation of narrators—all characters at a fictional small liberal arts school on Lake Michigan.

Character likability. “Plot-driven” as pejorative. Research limits in historical fiction. The mail-order-bride as escape route. The double-edged sword of social media. Anna Solomon tells it straight in this conversation with Sara Schaff.