The critics

Dwight Garner reviews Ta-Nehisi Coates’s debut novel, “The Water Dancer,” about a slave with supernatural powers escaping his circumstances. “Coates writes as if he’s thrown his readers into a carriage and is hurtling them through the woods,” Garner says. “The ride is bracing, even if one sometimes misses the grainy and intense intellection of his nonfiction writing.”

Benjamin Moser’s new landmark biography of Susan Sontag is a book “as handsome, provocative and troubled as its subject,” according to our critic Parul Sehgal.

Sehgal also writes about “The Dutch House,” the new novel by Ann Patchett about two siblings cast out of their family home by their loathsome stepmother. Sehgal calls the book a novel “with a clarity and transparency of purpose and method, a refusal of narrative tricksiness.”

Don’t miss our profile of Patchett, in which she describes the process of writing “The Dutch House.” “It was horrible to write,” she told our reporter, cheerfully. “It was like Thelma and Louise going over a cliff. I made so many errors in judgment.”

In other news

Congratulations to the authors whose work was longlisted for the National Book Award, including Colson Whitehead, Patrick Radden Keefe and Julia Phillips. The shortlist of finalists in each category are scheduled to be announced on Oct. 8, and the winners on Nov. 20 at an awards ceremony in New York City.