Avigayl Sharp’s Offseason is a deeply internal debut, charting the bounds of a violent, unpredictable world through its truth-seeking (and perpetually dishonest) narrator. The novel follows an unnamed woman during her year as an instructor at a remote all girls school, where she’s filling in for an older male teacher on leave for an unspecified reason.  Through her interactions with administrators and students, the narrator’s idiosyncratic worldview comes into relief. She fixates on the victimization of students—those manipulated and adultified by the very authority figures who are meant to guide them—and recalls the “multiple pedophiles and ephebophiles” (adults with sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents) who ran unchecked at her own high school. At the same time, she nurtures an idyllic admiration for Joseph Stalin, focusing on his difficult upbringing and childhood mistreatment rather than his autocratic reign.…