About a third of the way through A Day Like Any Other Schuyler’s poems begin to dot the pages, and Nathan Kernan hits his stride. He’s wonderful in walking us through a work, piecing together a line, and breaking a fourth wall in the process.

What more worthy challenge than to conjure a humanity far from one’s own, at odds with one’s convictions and values, and still to empathize? Every writer should look at the world with openness, not surety, striving “to be one of the people,” as Henry James famously put it, “on whom nothing is lost.” This is one of Zadie Smith’s specialties. But it sure can get her in trouble.

At many moments in V13, the experience is that of watching a master magician, wondering how he might possibly pull off his next act. How, one wonders, will Carrère bring us through so much terror and suffering, make meaning out of misery, and wring coherence from the incomprehensible?

What will become of the COVID-era couple, face-masked and train-delayed, whose first date is forever commemorated in the opening and closing moments of Claire Read’s offbeat new short, Penn F—ing Station? It’s hard to be too hopeful: the deck is stacked against them. Theirs is a Love in the Time of Intractable Municipal Policy Failure.