"Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel. The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past. Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others,...

“The tender biography of a sickly marmoset that was adopted by Leonard Woolf and became a fixture of Bloomsbury society.” Dwight Garner, The New York Times. “In short, glistening sentences that refract the larger world, Ms. Nunez describes the appealingly eccentric, fiercely intelligent Woolfs during a darkening time.” The Wall Street Journal. By the National Book Awardwinning author of The Friend. In 1934, a "sickly pathetic marmoset” named...

A memoir of the writer responsible for the avant-garde Against Interpretation depicts her as a magnetic, outsized personality and a polarizing presence who made being an intellectual a glamorous occupation.