Hader co-created and stars as a hitman who enrolls in acting classes in the dark comedy series. In the second season, Barry struggled to express himself as an actor — while keeping his past a secret.

Raphael Bob-Waksberg's new short story collection, Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory, opens with an Internet date that's going well. "He's handsome, and charming, and everything he claimed to be on the website," the woman thinks, somewhat to her surprise. Later, at the man's house, he offers her a can of cashews that looks suspiciously like a novelty product that, once opened, will release a spring-loaded snake.

When Xavier Wentworth was 12, his parents took him to a party. Bored with the adults, he wandered into a room of the host's house where he saw, hanging on the wall like some rare tapestry, a quilt. It was crude, ugly, with clashing colors and roughhewn shapes, but something about it called to him. Images seemed to flicker across it. The pattern pulsed. And the longer he stared at it, the more it came to resemble a portal — a window on the wall that opened up into a place of salt water and tall grasses, of lush trees and a certain purple-pink color that infused the very air.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

The recent Dark Phoenix movie offers two familiar narratives. The obvious (from the comics and the first generation of the franchise) has Jean Grey wrestling with new powers that enhance both her abilities and her capacity for destruction.

But this X-generation is younger, which gives Jean's struggle some distinctly adolescent subtext. And it's the reaction of her team members as much as anything that speaks to being a teenage girl: People around you — even if they know you — treat you as inherently unknowable, deeply irrational, and somehow dangerous.

Hey, you. Did you really like A Canticle For Leibowitz but think it needed more robot hookers and a talking goat? Then FKA USA is the book for you.

Did you think The Road suffered by not having enough gunfights with Mormons? Do you have a fondness for The Wizard Of Oz but believe, deep in your weird little heart, that it suffered a crippling lack of footnotes, bad language and fart jokes? Yeah, me, too. Which is (maybe) why I liked FKA USA so much.

Mark Haddon's latest novel, The Porpoise, inhabits a strange interstitial space between myth, fantasy, tragedy, and adventure. Among other things, it's a reimagining of the ancient legend of Antiochus, a king who develops an incestuous relationship with his daughter following the death of his wife and is ultimately exposed by Apollonius of Tyre, an adventurer dealing with his own set of troubles.