Colson whitehead

Joker: Folie à Deux In theaters October 4 Set in the aftermath of the first Joker film, Folie à Deux returns to Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck in the Arkham State Hospital as he faces trial for five murders. While under treatment, he meets and falls in love with fellow patient Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, a woman obsessed with his Joker alter ego. The sequel is a smudgy Seventies crime noir deviation from the canonical material of DC Comics characters Joker and Harley Quinn; this Joker does not become the Clown Prince of Crime. With no Batman in sight, Joaquin Phoenix engages in a chaotic pas de deux with Lady Gaga as he stops taking his medication and descends into an MGM dreamscape of musical fantasia.

If you are a male, middle-aged, middle-class novelist, do not despair of being deemed unpublishable in our era of identity politics. On both sides of the Atlantic, the smartest chaps have turned away from the interiority of literary fiction. From Colson Whitehead and Marlon James to Mick Herron and Charles Cumming, they now write detective fiction, speculative fantasy, or a combination of the two. Francis Spufford, the award-winning author of best-selling novels such as Golden Hill, has come up with a zinger. Cahokia Jazz is set in a 1920s city in a counterfactual America. Here, the native Americans were not fatally weakened by a deadly strain of smallpox, but experienced the milder version which has just a 1 percent mortality rate and confers immunity.