Deborah Eisenberg

Virtuosos of Self-Deception

Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery, originally published in 1948, is a slippery, feverish, dreamlike book that refuses to adapt to the conventions of what a novel ought to be.

Their Glorious Façades

Gavin Lambert’s novel The Goodby People captures the serious disorientation of 1960s Los Angeles.

Condemned to Life

The austerely drawn world of Jacqueline Harpman’s novel I Who Have Never Known Men provides a richly allusive consideration of human life.

Magic Mountains

The first English translation of Adalbert Stifter’s short story collection Motley Stones brings us into contact with his transporting and ineffable mystery.

The Writer’s Mind

“I had to find a way of mapping the swamp of stuff inside your head, which is a constantly changing representation of you plus the whole rest of the world, and how those things fit together.”

Poised and Precarious

Despite the ebullience of Anthony Veasna So’s stories, they ask difficult questions about immigration, assimilation, and whether there’s ever such a thing as one’s “own” life.

Awful But Joyful

In her autobiographical Copenhagen Trilogy, Tove Ditlevsen asks us neither to condemn nor to forgive—only to look.

Threats Real and Imaginary

Tyrannical Days

The Driest Eye

The pure, entrancing, and alarming voice of Natalia Ginzburg

After the Gold Rush

Bill Morrison’s transfixing documentary ‘Dawson City: Frozen Time’

On Robert Silvers

Nineteen writers remember The New York Review’s editor.

Henry Green’s Universe

The experience of reading twentieth-century British novelist Henry Green is far more animating than the ordinary and extends far beyond the usual confines: it can be almost physical, as if the thought or sensation expressed on the page were being generated by one’s own, not the author’s, mind.

A Blinding Need for Each Other

Magda Szabó’s ‘The Door’

A Wonderful Novel and an Impossible Challenge

Jenny Erpenbeck’s ‘The End of Days’

Cross Off and Move On

A story

Recalculating

A story

Quiet, Shattering, Perfect

The World We Live In

Becoming Susan Sontag