Read Stella Maris

Quantum panics.

Knopf, December 6.

Sixteen years after The Road, Cormac McCarthy has emerged with a pair of new novels. October’s The Passenger deals with two siblings’ darkly interconnected dynamic; Stella Maris, its shorter companion and exegesis, is made up mostly of conversations between one half of the pair, who is a profoundly gifted mathematician, and her therapist in a psychiatric hospital.