Literary fiction: August's best-written recent releases I

Read the openings of our picks below ^ Plus Part 39 of The Demon Inside David Lynch

Twin Peaks: The Return Part 8: in the form of an insect, the Big Bad crawls into the mouth of the young Sarah Palmer

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In today’s issue:

— ‘“Kitsch,” his mother had explained, “isn’t in itself beautiful but instead elicits its emotion from the beauty it depicts. Like that black ceramic panther in the bookcase’: the opening story from the new collection by a possible genius.

— ‘This fire would have amazed her. The heat was so incredibly hot it reminded me of something I learned in physics: the fact that the air around a lightning bolt is hotter than the surface of the sun. It was a barn burning—not with any political or racial overtones, but a necessary burn of an old wooden grain bin in the center of town in Whiting, Iowa, where I grew up’: our next literary fiction pick, and also the next from our subscribers’ submissions. We’ll soon be publishing the writer’s detailed…