Medical history’s ultimate bad girl was Mary Mallon, the Irish cook who refused to concede that she might be a typhoid carrier, in spite of the trail of death that followed her. And an outrageous act of artistic appropriation fuels **Claire Messud’**s The Woman Upstairs(Knopf), in which a New England schoolteacher and self-described good girl finds her creative energies-as well as a shimmering, long-dormant anger-awakened by a friendship with a student’s mother, a glamorous Italian artist. (See an expanded review, and an interview with the author, in _Vogue’_s April issue.) Inspired by Dorothea Lange’s iconic Depression-era photograph, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, **Marisa Silver’**s ingenious Mary Coin (Blue Rider) captures the points of view of photographer and subject, both of whom find their lives shadowed by the image’s monumental fame. Determined to make her name, Reno falls in with a group of conceptual artists and filmmakers, each out to break down the boundaries between performance and reality-but it’s not until she pushes a few limits of her own that she understands what’s really at stake. “Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it,” says “Reno,” the 22-year-old aspiring artist and speed-obsessed motorcycle enthusiast of **Rachel Kushner’**s stunning second novel, The Flamethrowers (Scribner), which conjures 1970s New York’s gritty art world. From historical provocateurs to contemporary artists, spring fiction celebrates fierce women.
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