This is an edition of Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best books.

In 2017, the #MeToo movement enabled many women who had been abused by powerful men to have their voices heard for the first time. Not long after, writers began responding to the moment with a series of novels that centered women’s experiences of sexual misconduct. Jo Hamya’s new novel The Hypocritewhich follows a young playwright named Sophia as she puts her new work together, takes a slightly different approach. As Hillary Kelly wrote in an essay about the book, Hamya devotes much of the perspective of Sophia’s unnamed father, who has played little role in his daughter’s life. He is a writer and a libertine whose novels read, according to Sophia, like “extended rape scenes in movies,” and he has defended famous men who have harassed women.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic‘s book section:

Kelly’s essay made me think of another #MeToo book that gives a voice to an immoderate man: Mary Gaitskill’s 2019 novella, This is pleasure. Gaitskill switches perspective between two characters: Quin, a successful book editor whose life is in shambles after several women accuse him of inappropriate behavior, and Margot, his friend and colleague. Women Quin considered friends have turned on him, claiming that his past advances, which he thought were welcome and reciprocated, were in fact one-sided and predatory. Margot, who once rebuffed Quin’s previous advances, crucially does not see herself as his victim. Her voice adds nuance to a story that might seem to many outsiders like a fairly clear-cut case of long-overdue reckoning. She views Quin as alternately clueless, annoying, and amusing. And although she recognizes the anger of the women who accused him, her love for him never wanes.

As Kelly writes, we must ask ourselves whether including men in these stories might help us better understand “women’s stories of powerlessness and oppression.” I’m not sure of the answer to that question; many people argue that a perpetrator’s voice has no place in a victim’s story. But hearing Sophia’s father in Hamya’s book and Quin in Gaitskill’s book gives the reader a reason to feel sorry for them. And pity, as Kelly puts it, “is a weapon: it makes its object smaller and weaker.”

In The Hypocritethe reader winces as the father squirms with embarrassment while watching his daughter’s play, which trashes an unworldly older writer clearly modeled on him. One might also feel sorry for Quin, who at one point is told by his wife that he is “not even a predator. Not even. You’re a fool. A tricky, sly fool. That’s unbearable.” But in both books, making the object of pity “smaller and weaker” is no easy victory for the women he has hurt. As Kelly writes, Hamya recognizes that “the question of how to deal with womanizers (to use an intentionally outdated term) is not easily answered by shaming them.” Instead, Hamya leaves open the question of how to hold these men accountable. Pity may be just a first step in regaining the power they once had.

Look at the flail

By Hillary Kelly

In Jo Hamya’s new novel, compassion becomes a form of power.

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What you should read

Personal daysby Ed Park

Anyone who has ever had a demoralizing office job will find Park’s satirical novel instantly familiar. Its protagonists, eight employees of an unnamed New York company, struggle with the mysterious formatting errors of Microsoft Word, speculate over drinks about their bosses’ sex lives, and live in fear of the corporate overlords who are threatening to buy out their company, which they call “the Californians.” But things take a turn when a member of the staff, Jill, is suddenly fired and a new employee named Graham – or “Grime,” as everyone calls him because of his British accent – arrives. The mysteries mount. What is the meaning of the cryptic notebook in which someone has copied inspirational quotes from corporate self-help books? Or the Post-its with the name Jason scrawled on them? And why is Grime so strange? You’ll keep turning the pages to find answers to these questions, but the real pleasure of the book lies in its pitch-perfect depiction of office culture: the strange mix of intimacy and distance that comes from spending most of your time with people whose private lives you know little about. I found myself laughing – often – because I recognized them. — Chelsea Leu

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Coming next week

📚 There are rivers in heavenby Elif Shafak

Your weekend reading

A film that understands the internet generation of the 2000s

By Shirley Li

A crowd-pleasing portrait of adolescent angst, Dìdi — this year’s Sundance Audience Award winner — has been compared to films like Eighth Grade, Lady Bird, and Mid90s. To a certain extent, those comparisons make sense: Chris, like those films’ protagonists, wants to stand out as who he is while also fitting in with everyone else. But Dìdi sets itself apart by exploring more than just the turbulence of growing pains; it’s also a period piece that understands the flattening effect of the internet on teenagers in particular. The “screen life” format, which follows a character’s actions entirely through digital interfaces, has been used in films like Searching and Missing as a clever device to immerse an entire plot in the digital world, but here it’s used only in key sequences, capturing the particular confusion experienced by a generation of kids who spent their formative years interacting via social media. Dealing with crushes and overprotective parents is child’s play, says Dìdi, compared to figuring out how to define yourself online when you’re not even sure how you define yourself in real life.

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