Here’s a fun word problem for you: If siblings Jer (Noah Galvin), Jake (Seth Numrich) and Ruby (Libby Woodbridge) are digging a hole in the mountains during winter, and it has to be at least 4 feet deep to keep the family secret buried, and their mother (Kathryn Erbe) interrupts them while toting a shotgun, 
For the moment, let’s ignore the fact that Wit, Margaret Edson’s cerebral, Pulitzer Prize-winning cancer play, is not in need of a major revival the likes of which it has been given by Manhattan Theatre Club. Between the legendary Off-Broadway run starring Kathleen Chalfant and the 2001 TV film starring Emma Thompson, the story of exacting 
There is a curious airiness to Lydia Millet’s novel Ghost Lights, despite its underlying tension. A pseudo-sequel to her 2008 How the Dead Dream, Ghost Lights finds married family man Hal, an IRS bureaucrat, sloughing off the confines of his everyday life to impulsively hop on a plane in search of his wife’s missing boss, 
The life of an actor remains endlessly fascinating, even as their minor crises of conscience and career seem more and more rote to the general public. For some reason, Esther Freud has been seduced by the glitz and glamour, and the result is her mildly diverting but ultimately disappointing Lucky Break 
The case of Sybil, the pseudonym for a young woman suffering from 17 multiple personalities as the result of some Gothic child abuse at the hands of her monstrous mother, became a cultural touchstone almost immediately upon the 1973 publication of Flora Rheta Schreiber’s nonfiction account of her treatment 
A playful look at love, literature and Bluebeard, Helen Oyeyemi’s new novel, Mr. Fox, is nonetheless a serious piece of fiction. The tone is lighthearted, but beneath the veneer of arch teasing between novelist Mr. Fox, his muse, Mary Foxe, and his unhappy wife, Daphne, lies a nuanced examination of how we manage our expectations 
There are more than a few echoes in Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz, a chilly and scalpel-sharp remembrance of an extramarital affair and its aftershocks. Enright’s icy prose has been called Didion-esque, and there’s a similarly unflinching quality to her heroine’s self-assessment as in Jardine Libaire’s Here Kitty Kitty. But The Forgotten Waltz is defiantly, 
David Rowell has given himself a large canvas with his new novel, The Train of Small Mercies. Leaping from city to city on the day Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral train chugged slowly down the East Coast, Rowell’s cast of characters comprise the whole of an America on the cusp of major changes. The problem is, 
