Rachel Cusk, Raven Leilani and Hari Kunzru are among writers inspired by artists to find shape and form in their own works

With this freewheeling examination of creation, gender and art, the bold and original Cusk is ever more determined to write about life precisely as she finds it

Navigating the extreme gap between a woman’s life and the one she imagined for herself, the writer’s third novel is concise, rigorous and heartbreaking

The long read: Andrew Wylie is agent to an extraordinary number of the planet’s biggest authors. His knack for making highbrow writers very rich helped to define a literary era – but is his reign now coming to an end?

Authors, critics and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

Cusk’s puzzling reworking of a 1932 memoir by an American bohemian suggests she’s in creative limbo

The deeply gendered experience of freedom is cunningly exposed in a shocking interrogation of art, privilege and property

From Evelyn Waugh to Virginia Woolf and Sally Rooney, these novels offer masterclasses in dialogue-driven narrative

Urban junkies, competitive mothers, adolescent girls caught in the world of Charles Manson ... Lara Feigel picks her 10 favourites

With Dalloway Day falling on Wednesday, Alex Clark picks books with a time limit – from Ulysses to a novel set over a lunchbreak

Long famous in Italy, the writer is gaining readers in Britain with her vivid depictions of family life, the female experience, postwar hardship and hope

A writer who has swapped city life for sheep farming chooses reading attuned to the year’s cycles, from Rachel Cusk to Marcel Proust

Women too often have their lives rather than their books reviewed. Writers including Joyce Maynard and Olivia Sudjic consider how this can be resisted