A Studio’s Shadow Over the Bookshelf
A24 has moved well past underdog status. The production and distribution company behind some of the most psychologically demanding films in recent American cinema – The Brutalist, Past Lives, Janet Planet – is now a dominant force in the kind of storytelling that used to struggle to find screens at all. Which raises a useful summer question: if a film leaves you wanting more of whatever it gave you, where do you go next?
Unease, Grief, and the Parenting Novel
Start with The Drama, the recent A24 psychological thriller that keeps its violence mostly offscreen and its menace strictly interior. If that particular flavor of dread appeals, Marie Ndiaye’s My Heart Hemmed In is the logical next move. The French novelist has spent her career colliding mundane domestic life with slow-building political alienation – exactly the territory The Drama circles without ever quite entering. Ndiaye names what the film prefers to imply.
Rose Byrne’s turn in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You as a mother fraying at every edge has drawn comparisons to the best literature of women pushed past their limits. Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane – a Pulitzer Prize finalist play – earns that comparison directly. Where a lot of writing about new motherhood settles for broad emotional overwhelm, Herzog goes specifically after the fatigue and terror of caring for a child with extraordinary medical needs. It’s an unflinching piece of work, and it shares the film’s refusal to offer relief.
Sorry, Baby occupies similar emotional territory – trauma examined from an intellectual’s distance, never quite tamed into resolution. Emily Labarge’s memoir Dog Days is doing something comparable on the page. Labarge treats violence and the impulse to write about it as genuinely complicated forces, not opposites. Novelist Catherine Lacey praised the book in a Substack letter, and it has been generating serious word-of-mouth in literary circles. The cultural and psychological weight Sorry, Baby carries? Dog Days handles it without the safety net of narrative.
Then there’s Friendship, the A24 film that took a quietly obsessive one-sided attachment and played it with absurdist warmth – Paul Rudd doing what Paul Rudd does, the whole thing tilting between tender and faintly ridiculous. Wayne Koestenbaum’s novel My Lover the Rabbi is not an obvious pairing, but the underlying fascination is the same: the psychosexual texture of fixation, treated with gleeful irreverence rather than clinical gravity. The rabbi, in this case, occupies roughly the position Paul Rudd does. Whether that intrigues or alarms you probably determines whether this is your summer read.
Love, Inheritance, and the Architecture of Loss
Materialists, the A24 romantic drama about a woman navigating modern courtship with unusual strategic clarity, works best when its logic starts to crack. Mariam Rahmani’s debut novel Liquid follows a Ph.D. candidate on a ruthless quest to marry rich – same unsentimental framing, same eventual betrayal by actual feeling. Rahmani’s protagonist applies a rigorous economic intelligence to the problem of love, and the novel is sharp about how that framework holds and where it doesn’t. Readers who found Materialists most interesting in its moments of structural collapse will find Liquid covers that same ground with more room to breathe.
For The Brutalist – Brady Corbet’s three-and-a-half-hour film following a Hungarian refugee architect through decades of American promise and disappointment – the instinct might be to reach for something similarly monumental. Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History fits that description without trying to match the film’s scale. Messud traces three generations of the Cassar family wrestling with what it means to come from colonial history and carry it forward. The novel’s real interest is in the stories families tell about their own origins – the edits, the distortions, the inheritance no one chose. That’s where it meets The Brutalist, in the gap between the life someone wanted to build and the one the world allowed.
Celine Song’s Past Lives remains one of the more genuinely affecting films A24 has distributed – a story of ambiguous loss, of mourning the version of yourself that existed with someone else. Aisha Muharrar’s debut novel Loved One enters that same emotional register. Muharrar has spent most of her career as a television writer, and Loved One is a first novel, but it’s already been positioned as a real contribution to the unresolved-ex-boyfriend literary genre – which is a genre, whether it’s labeled one or not. The question Past Lives asks – how do we mourn the people we were with our other people? – is the question Loved One refuses to answer cleanly either.
Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, the playwright’s feature directorial debut, is warm and observational in a way that feels almost against the grain of contemporary cinema – long pauses, a dreamy mother, a summer disrupted by the arrival of an unsettling man. Helen Garner’s novella The Children’s Bach occupies the same register: an Australian writer known for cool, precise observation of bohemian domestic life, a story that spins around a mother whose world is quietly destabilized by a rakish intruder. Garner is one of those writers whose reputation runs ahead of her readership – better known among serious fiction readers than the general public, particularly outside Australia.
What these pairings share is a resistance to tidy emotional resolution. None of these books explain away what the films leave hanging. My Heart Hemmed In doesn’t resolve its couple’s crisis. Dog Days doesn’t conclude that writing about trauma is either sufficient or impossible. Loved One doesn’t answer whether its protagonist made the right choices. That structural irresolution is, arguably, the one quality A24 films and serious literary fiction have most reliably in common – not darkness exactly, but a refusal to pretend the difficult parts eventually flatten out.
What the Shelf Looks Like After the Credits
A24’s ascent from indie distributor to cultural institution has happened quickly enough that the studio now functions as a kind of taste signal – shorthand for a particular appetite. Saying you love A24 films means something specific about what you want from a story, in the same way that citing a favorite novelist immediately communicates something about your tolerances and preferences.
Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach is out of print in the United States, available mainly through import or used booksellers. Whether a summer film recommendation drives enough demand to change that is the kind of small industry question that probably nobody is tracking – but someone should be.
