Meehan Crist

"The mind evolved in the sea," writes Godfrey-Smith, but if water is our origin it may also be our destiny.

There is no such thing as "the veteran experience," particularly in a war on terror waged across multiple countries for more than 10 years.

For families like Sternburg's lobotomy offered a last resort that tugged on the tangled heartstrings of compassion and self-preservation, love and fear.

We begin to see OCD in relation to what is considered normal human behavior, such as daydreaming and the rituals invented by children, suggesting that OCD may be the exaggerated expression of certain traits more or less apparent in all of us.

In her remarkable new essay collection, The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison looks long and hard at what it means to feel empathy. 'Empathy isn't just listening to, it's asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination.'

MacLean has hallucinations and memory lapses, flitting in and out of consciousness like a surrealist television show playing on a set with a haywire power button.

Lauren swallows scissors, light bulbs, batteries, bedsprings, knives. Eddie pinches pennies for plastic surgeries he can't afford and rubs his face raw with sandpaper trying to fix disfiguring acne scars that no one else sees...

Their stories all revolve around visual perception and language, and the relationship between those two — subjective experience and how one describes that experience — provides the real enigma at the heart of this book.

With "C," Tom McCarthy has written an avant-garde masterpiece — a sprawling cryptogram — in the guise of an epic, coming-of-age period piece.

But in all this fooling around with form, something serious is at stake.