Tom Perrotta is often called a satirist. It’s a nice, neat label, as square-cornered as a pigeonhole. But it’s just not true.

"The classical definition of satire is that you’re exposing the folly of human behavior,” Perrotta says during a call to his home in the Boston suburb of Belmont. Perrotta lives there with his wife, the writer Mary Granfield, and their two teenaged children. “For me there is no position where it is possible to be a human and not be implicated in the folly of human behavior. I always feel I’m implicated in that folly.” 

Perrotta supposes he earned the satirist label from the movie Election, which starred Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick. He wrote the novel on which the movie is based. “Election is one of the great satires in recent film history,” Perrotta says. “It was much more satirical than the book. Just compare Tracy Flick in the book with what Reese Witherspoon does with her in the film. The book is a comic novel but it’s not a satirical novel. The film pushes out! Because Election first brought me to the attention of most people, I’m in this box: People think of me, they think ofElection, and they think of the movie.”

Perrotta’s boldest novel to date puts a whole new spin on apocalyptic anxiety after a Rapture-like event.

Not that Perrotta has any objections to the movie. “I really loved the movie, myself. I still do. It really holds up too, and it’s been really influential in all sorts of ways. I think the success of the movie basically changed my life. I had published a few books and I was struggling to find an audience. I felt a real difference in the aftermath.

“I used to have that moment where I’d be introduced at a party and say, oh, I’m a writer, and people would say, have you written anything I’ve read? And I’d name my books and I’d get that terrible blank look. Now I could say, well, there was this movie with Reese Witherspoon, and people would light up,” Perrotta recalls. “It felt like a big difference that my name was attached to something people had positive feelings toward. The other concrete thing it did was allow me to find work as a screenwriter, which allowed me to stop teaching and really solidified my sense of myself as a professional writer.”

Still, the satire label that has trotted beside Perrotta like an over-friendly stray dog does not come close to encapsulating his estimable gifts as a writer. Or, as Perrotta says wryly, “Certainly what I’m doing now is very far away in terms of tone from that movie.”

That’s for sure. Perrotta’s early novels were set in working-class New Jersey, where he grew up and developed a passion for writing that eventually took him to Yale. But since his novel Little Children (2004), “there’s been a shift in the suburban territory that I write about” that both comically and tenderly reflects the attitudes and personal dilemmas of residents of the more affluent middle-class suburb where he now lives.

Not only that, his use of language has matured. Reminded that he once proclaimed that he wrote in the plain American English tradition of Ernest Hemingway, Perrotta laughs and says, “If you go back to Bad Haircut (1994) you’ll definitely see more of the Hemingway influence. I mean those sentences were just so short! But even then I was using that shortness for comedy in a way that Hemingway didn’t. Probably since Joe College (2000) the sentences have gotten looser and more complex in terms of syntax. So I’ve moved away from the Hemingway impulse. But I have to say that I have not moved away from the idea that literary fiction should work the way that popular fiction works, in terms of being a pleasure to read, with a story that moves swiftly.

“I have always wanted to be democratic,” Perrotta says. “My parents didn’t go to college and a lot of people I grew up with are not ‘intellectuals’ in the graduate school sense. I never wanted to write for a self-selected group of people who see themselves as literary. I want to write for anybody who is interested.”

All of these maturing impulses meld in near-perfect harmony to bring us Perrotta’s newest, most audacious and best novel to date, The Leftovers.

Set in the leafy suburb of Mapleton, The Leftovers opens on Departed Heroes’ Day of Remembrance and Reflection, three years to the day after a Rapture-like event has caused millions of people all over the world to disappear in an instant. In reaction, some people, like Laurie Garvey, join a monastic penitential cult called The Guilty Remnant, whose members dress all in white, smoke cigarettes as an article of faith and ghost about Mapleton to remind people that the end is near. Others, like Laurie’s college-age son Tom, follow the prophet Holy Wayne, a former UPS delivery van driver, and his Holy Hugs Movements. But many, like Laurie’s husband Kevin, the mayor of Mapleton, struggle to lead normal lives and keep their children—in Kevin’s case his teenage daughter Jill—from going off the rails. The action of the novel unfolds over nine months, as the Garvey family and their friends and acquaintances struggle to make sense of a world that is in most ways much the same as before but is also profoundly different.

Perrotta, who devours literary biographies and hardboiled detective fiction rather than literary novels while he is composing his own books, admits that he was thinking about books like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road while writing The Leftovers. 

“Obviously The Road was on my mind. But I think this book is almost the opposite ofThe Road. The landscape of The Road is utterly altered in the physical and in the human/social sense. What I wanted to do was create a world where the landscape wasn’t altered at all physically or socially. But psychologically it’s completely different. So whatever strangeness there is, is hard to locate, aside from the people dressed in white who are smoking, I mean. There are some changes that are visible and troubling. But in most cases it’s just much more a sense of ‘I can no longer trust the nature of the world,’ and that creates this feeling of anxiety.” 

Another huge difference between The Leftovers and The Road is Perrotta’s gift for comedy. “I certainly found subject matter that is hard to treat comically. Loss is not easy to treat in a comical way,” he says with a laugh. Yet Perrotta is such a keen observer of human psychology—and human foibles—that many moments in The Leftovers are laugh-out-loud funny. “I think the comedy in this works best when it’s organic to the situation,” Perrotta says. “There’s comedy in incongruity. This juxtaposition of almost clinical grief with this insistence on living a normal life does create certain kinds of very dark comedy.”

But Perrotta’s comedy is colored by great empathy for his characters. “Certain characters open up over time. It’s very satisfying for me as a writer to live with these characters long enough to get a fuller sense of who they are and how they fit into the story. They just seem to get more agency somehow to tell you a little bit about who they are.”

Among The Leftovers’ most appealing characters are the smart, vulnerable teenager Jill and her Goth friend Aimee. “I’ve written a lot about my own teenage years and coming of age. But with this book I suddenly realized I had to write the Jill sections from Jill’s perspective, and this time I was filtering that through my daughter and her friends, not through my own personal memories.” 

Perrotta notes, “I had this idea and it seized my mind—but for a long time I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it. It’s probably good for a writer to feel that way, to feel like you’re delving into messy, interesting, important subject matter without exactly knowing why. And I was starting to feel my identity was almost too solid. Like people talked about me in a certain way. Like they knew what a Tom Perrotta novel was. I wasn’t comfortable with that. You start going into the old bag of tricks too much. 

“Obviously some things in this book will be familiar—the setting and the subject matter will remind some people of other things I’ve written. But I think on the most basic ground level, I’ve forced myself into unfamiliar territory.”

It’s true. In this brilliant novel, he has definitely gotten himself a whole new bag of tricks. If you’ve never read a Tom Perrotta novel, now’s the time.

Colson Whitehead has a problem—a big problem. He can’t stop thinking about zombies, even when he’s asleep.

“I’ve been having zombie dreams ever since I saw Dawn of the Dead in seventh grade,” Whitehead says during a call to his home in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood. “Some people have anxiety dreams about showing up late for school or having forgotten about that big assignment. I have zombie dreams.”

Whitehead is explaining the genesis of his newest marvel, Zone One, about a zombie fighter in lower Manhattan whose post-apocalypse nom de guerre is Mark Spitz.

“I had some guests out to Long Island but I was going through something and I think I really wanted to be alone. I was wishing that my guests would leave, and I had a dream that I was going downstairs to the living room and I was wondering if someone had cleared out the zombies yet. I woke up and I thought, hmmm, that’s something you have to consider: Once you put civilization back together, what do you do with all these zombies? So the book grew from there.”

Whitehead, a highly—and deservedly—praised novelist and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, says his “schtick at the moment is to try different genres. Sag Harbor is a coming of age novel. John Henry Days has a very loose structure. The Intuitionist has a very tight structure. . . . In Zone One I wanted to pay homage to the zombie movies and horror movies that I loved as a kid and still love to watch.”

Of course Colson Whitehead inhabits a genre like no one else. And his take on zombie/horror movies pays homage to the form but is at the same time startlingly original. “I have a darkly absurdist sense of humor that is part of my personality,” he admits. 

Whitehead’s main character, Mark Spitz, is a supposedly mediocre human being. “My sense,” Whitehead explains, “is that if you’re incredibly dumb, you’d probably be killed off quickly, and if you’re really on top of things, you’d probably kill yourself.” 

“I thought . . . once you put civilization back together, what do you do with all these zombies? So the book grew from there.”

But Spitz is also the consciousness through which Whitehead delivers some of his most enthralling—and sometimes hilarious—observations about modern life: “But then there are the personal barricades, Mark Spitz thought. Since the first person met the second person. The ones that keep other people out and our madness in so we can continue to live.”

Or, describing a chopper trip over Central Park: “Mark Spitz had seen the park unscroll from the windows of the big skyscrapers crowding the perimeter, but never from this vantage. No picnickers idled on their blankets, no one goldbricked on the benches and nary a Frisbee arced through the sky, but the park was at first-spring-day capacity. They didn’t stop to appreciate the scenery, these dead visitors; they ranged on the grass and walkways without purpose or sense, moving first this way then strolling in another direction until, distracted by nothing in particular, they readjusted their idiot course. It was Mark Spitz’s first glimpse of Manhattan since the coming of the plague, and he thought to himself, My God, it’s been taken over by tourists.”

Although Whitehead is a native New Yorker, Zone One is the first novel he has explicitly set in the city (The Intuitionist was set in a kind of “alternative gotham”). A meticulous researcher who plans out his work before he begins writing, he notes that “about two years ago at this time, I was taking photographs of downtown New York, trying to figure out what corners would be good settings for the story. Part of the tone in Zone One is a nostalgia for your lost city and trying to get it back. I spent six or nine months before I started actually writing the book researching and plotting it out. I mean, I knew where Mark Spitz was going to be on the last page on the very first day I started writing. Some people start with a blank page and see where the characters will take them. I always feel it’s hard enough to find the right words each day. If you wake up and don’t even know what’s going to happen, it’s twice as hard. That’s my simple model.” 

Whitehead’s “right words” make Zone One not just keenly observant and funny but often downright scary. Before signing up to fight zombies in lower Manhattan, Spitz tries to escape the horror of the all-pervasive plague that unleashed the zombies by making a harrowing journey to Northampton, Massachusetts. In retrospect, as with many horror movies, a reader might laugh, but in the moment, such is Whitehead’s skill, one is more likely to cringe or even scream. Zone One is at times quite disturbing.

“Well I was disturbed when I was writing it,” Whitehead says. No, he doesn’t think that was because he was contemplating the upcoming 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack. “I grew up in New York in the ’70s. It was a sort of apocalyptic New York then. But certainly tackling the idea of how you come back from disaster, how you make the world livable again after it has been destroyed, how you find those reserves of strength in yourself and other people was important. I wasn’t thinking about 9/11 specifically, but it was one of the many disasters, personal or communal, that I was thinking about.”

The father of a six-year-old daughter, Whitehead was newly divorced while working on Zone One and wrote the book “camped in the corner” of his smallish new digs. “I like working at home. There’s something about being able to make coffee, watch some CNN, take a nap and go back to writing that works for me. I play loud music when I work. When I have only a couple of hours left, I put on ‘Purple Rain’ by Prince and ‘Daydream Nation’ by Sonic Youth. That’s my exit music for all of my books.”

Whitehead is justifiably proud of the final pages of Zone One. “Finally after a year and a half, you get to what you’ve been building toward. What makes a good ending is secretly encoded all along.”

And the ending of Zone One is very good indeed.

For most mere mortals, a position as a full-time historian and tenured professor at the University of Southern California would be sufficiently demanding. But not for Deborah Harkness, who has also managed to squeeze “best-selling novelist” onto her list of already impressive credentials.

In an apt parallel to the alchemists she studies in her scholastic life, Harkness appears to have created literary gold from an unlikely mixture of ingredients. The All Souls Trilogy is an addictive blend of history, science, romance and fantasy that chronicles the complicated relationship between a witch named Diana Bishop and a vampire named Matthew de Clairmont. The two embark on a quest for Ashmole 782, an enchanted manuscript believed to contain the secrets of their species’ origins.

The first book in the series, A Discovery of Witches, was published in more than 30 languages; its sequel, Shadow of Night, was even more popular and debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

“I don’t know if you can even imagine what it’s like if you haven’t done it—to make stuff up and for people to take it into their hearts.”

For someone whose prior experience with the publishing world was limited to academic works, the success of the series has been astounding. “I don’t know if you can even imagine what it’s like if you haven’t done it—to make stuff up and for people to take it into their hearts,” Harkness tells BookPage from her home in Los Angeles. “When I write scholarship, people take it into their heads. With this [series], I had a woman in her 80s say to me, ‘I had better not die before I find out what happened to my friends!’ That was amazing for me.”

Happily, fans need wait no longer to discover the thrilling fate of their friends. With The Book of Life, Matthew and Diana return to the present day after the time-travel adventures of Shadow of Night for the last leg of their fraught journey to uncover the secrets of Ashmole 782.

For readers who have spent the past few years living in the All Souls universe, this end of the series is highly anticipated, but also heralds the end of an era. Harkness herself has mixed emotions about closing the book on Matthew and Diana after six years in their company.
“It’s a bit strange, actually. I really have been living with [these characters and books] for a while, and it is kind of strange to wake up in the morning and to not immediately start thinking about [them],” she reflects. “But at the same time, I’m really pleased that we managed to deliver three books in a fairly reasonable timeframe.”

Sticking to her three-book goal wasn’t simple, however. “As it turns out, a trilogy is not an easy thing to write!” Harkness says. “When you set out to write a series, you are able to keep pursuing new plotlines and new characters and just let it organically resolve. But when you set out to write a trilogy, you have to be fairly disciplined. There were moments when I got frustrated because I wanted to introduce a new character or develop a side plot, but couldn’t. I had to be really mindful about tying things up.”

Not that she hasn’t had the space to do so. The Book of Life is the shortest installment of the trilogy, but at 576 pages, it’s still no lightweight. At a time when attention spans are dwindling and even the most dedicated readers have countless demands upon them, it’s a bold move to offer up such a hearty book. Yet Harkness insists that the length of her novels is actually part of their allure.

“You can curl up inside the world. They are so lush, so rich, and they don’t spare details,” she explains.

“There’s nothing like knowing all day that after dinner you get to go back to bed with your big book.”

It’s safe to say that fans of the series agree, and the sparks that fly between Harkness’ prickly protagonists have proven to be particularly captivating. Despite their otherworldly allegiances, their relationship is “real in all of those emotional ways that aren’t really handled in mainstream fiction,” as Harkness puts it.

“I have always found the traditional ‘will they, won’t they?’ arc really boring,” she confides. “Obviously they’re going to get together. So why not just cut to the chase and then say, ‘OK, now what?’ That’s when it gets complicated.”

That question of “now what?” will surely plague fans after they’ve raced to the end of The Book of Life. When pushed as to whether this is truly the end for this universe, Harkness says, “Whatever else may happen with the world of the Bishops and the de Clairmonts, we’re certainly not going to be returning to Diana and Matthew falling in love and establishing a family. That story is now told and I’m happy that that’s the case.”

Disappointing news for some, certainly, but take heart: Harkness won’t be disappearing from bookstores. Although it’s too early for her to divulge the details, she assures us that she has ideas for at least five different projects. “People can count on seeing new titles come out from me. Maybe not in six months, but certainly soon. Right now I don’t have any plans other than to sleep!”

With a book tour on the horizon, sleep may have to wait. Lucky for Harkness, once The Book of Life hits bookstores, she’ll be in good company—more than a few readers will be pulling all-nighters to find out whether Diana and Matthew live happily ever after.

Canadian writer Stephenie Harrison blogs at 20 Years Hence.

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.