Staff Picks: Rachel Lyon, Radiohead, and Richard Pryor

Karin Tidbeck.

Karin Tidbeck’s collection Jagannath strings together a chain of eerie vignettes where the fantastic creeps in from a place just outside your peripheral vision, subtly seeping into a reality you thought you recognized. Tidbeck translated these herself from her native Swedish, and the end result is a clear, succinct prose style that makes for a crisp blank canvas so that the strangeness of her plots and ideas stands out against a clean background. These stories are quick and varied, though Tidbeck deftly navigates each shift between narratives, keeping the reader hooked with swift, absorbing plots and empathetic, human characters. They often arrive at their endings unresolved but satisfying, and rarely ever in a place you thought they would take you. —Lauren Kane

Rachel Lyon. Photo: Debra Pearlman.

I read a draft of Rachel Lyon’s debut novel, , in 2014. The finished book, published this week by Scribner, has evolved and