Francine Prose

L’Esprit de l’Escalier

Heimito von Doderer’s midcentury novel The Strudlhof Steps restores Vienna to a brighter era, when, for most of the privileged, suffering entailed no more than ordinary heartbreak.

Laughing Last

In Molly Keane’s novels and plays, justice rarely triumphs, virtue is infrequently rewarded. Even tragedy can wear the mask of the grotesque and absurd.

Living with Saint Death

Mariana Enriquez’s fiction is haunted by the specter of late-twentieth-century Latin American history; the bodies are never buried very deep.

‘Their Chaotic Mouths’

What Can’t Be Forgotten

The Immigrant at Home

Wooster’s Tribute to Kantor

The Wooster Group’s A Pink Chair (in Place of a Fake Antique) suggests what it might have been like to watch a ghost materialize on stage, called up by an early-twentieth-century medium.

Boogie Nights

Truth in Advertising

There’s a great beauty in the determination and ferocious bravery of Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand)—and in the purity of McDormand’s choice of art and truth over glamour and vanity in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Censoring the 'Sensitivity Reader'

The culture of young adult fiction is partly dedicated to helping young people avoid and resist bullying, yet it is being shaped by online posts whose aggressive, even ferocious, tone could itself be described as online bullying.

This Empty House

One may wind up concluding that by far the most terrifying thing about Mother! is that Darren Aronofsky seems to be Hollywood’s idea of an intellectual, our own brainy, home-grown auteur.

On the Wilder Shores of Brooklyn

The Passion and Rage of Arundhati Roy

Comey's Language

Among the many riveting aspects of James Comey’s June 8 testimony was the opportunity to observe the senators and the former FBI director discuss the precise meaning of critical words and phrases.

Selling Her Suffering

The new TV series The Handmaid’s Tale has been enthusiastically acclaimed as a feminist classic. But in what sense is it “feminist” to provide viewers with a glossy, sensationalized portrayal of women’s deepest anxieties and paranoias?

‘Sex and the City’ in Hell

Ultimately, what’s most upsetting about the HBO series Big Little Lies is not the way the adults bully and abuse one another, but the way in which these loving parents treat their children.

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

Groping and Not Finding

Cocktails in a Cruel Country

In Wallace Shawn’s new play, Evening at the Talk House, as a group of friends reunite at a genteel, once-popular club, the harrowing details of life under the new regime begin to emerge. “Normalization” has been successful for some friends more than others.

The Dystopia in the Mirror

Watching Black Mirror—a science-fiction show about our drug-like addiction to technology—at bedtime is, I’ve discovered, unwise.