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Francine Prose

Francine Prose is a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard. Her new novel, Mister Monkey, was published last fall. (July 2017)

IN THE REVIEW

The Passion and Rage of Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy protesting the construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River, Gujarat, India, 1999

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

by Arundhati Roy
Most likely it would still make news today if a first novel by a young Indian woman living in India won the Man Booker Prize. Certainly it was big news in 1997, when Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things received the prestigious British award, and the resultant publicity helped …

Groping and Not Finding

Edward Hoagland, Bennington, Vermont, 2001

In the Country of the Blind

by Edward Hoagland
Sixty years have passed since the publication of Edward Hoagland’s first book, Cat Man, a novel that drew on his experience working with big cats in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Since then, he has written more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, essay collections and …

The Triumph of Foxy Grandpa

Michael Chabon, Oakland, California, January 2016; photograph by Benjamin Tice Smith

Moonglow

by Michael Chabon
On his deathbed, a cantankerous old Jewish guy, his habitual reticence disarmed by a painkiller, tells his life story to his grandson, a writer named Michael Chabon. This scenario, the premise of Chabon’s new novel, may make Moonglow sound more syrupy, more gimmicky—and less entertaining—than it is. In fact it’s …

The Cult of Saint Franz

Is that Kafka?: 99 Finds

by Reiner Stach, translated from the German by Kurt Beals
Almost a century after his death in 1924, Franz Kafka has become a sort of modern-day saint, one of those artist-martyrs revered, like Vincent van Gogh and Frida Kahlo, partly for their work and partly for the suffering they endured in order to create it. The process of Kafka’s “canonization” …

NYR DAILY

Words Still Matter

James Comey’s June 8 hearing proved that it is still possible for politicians to speak in complete sentences, to display a familiarity with history, to strive for linguistic and moral clarity: to make sense. But we are still waiting to hear from the senators and representatives with the fortitude to say lie as often as Trump’s supporters repeat not under investigation.

Selling Her Suffering

The new Hulu TV series The Handmaid’s Tale has been enthusiastically acclaimed as a feminist classic. Fortunately for the show’s producers, if not for the rest of us, this scenario seems uncannily timely, given how many recent events suggest that, if men like Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell have their way, we might end up living in a dystopia of our own. But gradually it occurred to me that I was watching an orgy of violence against women—promoted and marketed as high-minded, politically astute popular entertainment.

‘Sex and the City’ in Hell

Shailene Woodley as Jane, Reese Witherspoon as Madeline, and Nicole Kidman as Celeste, in Jean-Marc Vallée's Big Little Lies, 2017

What are we meant to conclude about the sexual experiences of women when we realize that two out of four of the smart, beautiful women in the HBO series Big Little Lies have been—or are being—abused? Perhaps it’s a sign of the times in which we live, that something intended to be a frothy, sexy Sunday night entertainment (it has been described as “darkly comic”) should turn out to conceal a message about the prevalence of overt and hidden violence against women.

NYR CALENDAR

‘The Brink’

Offhandedly mocking our inadequate, improvisatory foreign policy in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, The Brink is funny, inventive, and fearless in what it has to say about geopolitics.