Sam Sacks

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner has an overall rating of Positive based on 10 book reviews.

Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro has an overall rating of Positive based on 5 book reviews.

Plus “Season of the Swamp” by Yuri Herrera.

Plus Federico Falco’s “The Plains” and Esther Kinsky’s “Seeing Further.”

Plus Johannes Anyuru’s ‘Ixelles’ and Ariane Koch’s “Overstaying.”

When, in 2018, Pat Barker published “The Silence of the Girls,” the first novel in her Women of Troy series, the popularity of fiction revisiting ancient Greek mythology was still in its infancy. Now that Ms. Barker has published her third book set in this world, “The Voyage Home” (Doubleday, 288 pages, $29), such novels strain the bookstore shelves, many of them “feminist retellings” (to borrow the inevitable marketing term) of canonical myths, feisty lean-in fantasies that privilege the points of view of queens and goddesses. Ms. Barker, previously celebrated for her wonderful World War I-era Regeneration trilogy (1991-95), helped to establish some of this trend’s defining traits.

A child actor comes of age in 1980s Manhattan in Adam Ross’s novel.

Discussed in this essay: The Pornographer , by John McGahern. New York Review Books. 272 pages. $17.95.

CATASTROPHE is our bed-time story," wrote Don DeLillo, a poetic embellishment that nowadays carries an element of factuality.