Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Uncommon Women

In Andrea Barrett’s stories, female characters with at least one foot in the sciences have to pick sides and contend with radical changes.

December 8, 2022 issue

Edward Mendelson

Life, Death, This Moment of June

Mrs. Dalloway has the world-defining ambition and scope of every great epic, from Dante’s Commedia to Goethe’s Faust.

December 8, 2022 issue

Dan Chiasson

Road Maps for the Soul

The Philosophy of Modern Song can be read as a tour journal, refracted through one lonely song after another.

December 8, 2022 issue

Audrey Wollen

The Circuitous Sublime

Like most hauntings, Fleur Jaeggy’s books are often quite baroque, but they cast a strange spell that causes everyone to remember them as nothing but austere.

December 8, 2022 issue

Lucy Sante

Models for Being

A meditative essay on friendship weaves through Hua Hsu’s memoir, which is also about youth, Asian identity, zines, time, education, California, mixtapes, and more.

November 24, 2022 issue

Susan Barba, illustrated by Leanne Shapton

Language of the Field

What hold do wildflowers have on the land, and on our hearts and tongues?

October 26, 2022

Anahid Nersessian

A Vivisectional Style

A new biography of John Donne argues for the sensuality and strangeness of both his work and his life.

November 24, 2022 issue

Maya Jaggi

Resurrecting the Poets of Tbilisi

A new museum tells the story of the Soviet taming of Georgia’s intelligentsia. The echoes today are growing louder.

November 24, 2022 issue

Hilary Mantel (1952–2022)

Remembering Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel, illustration by Leanne Shapton

Hilary Mantel

From ‘Wolf Hall’

July 17, 2008 issue

Hilary Mantel

The Perils of Antoinette

January 11, 2007 issue

Hilary Mantel

Not ‘Everybody’s Dear Jane’

February 5, 1998 issue

Hilary Mantel

The War Against Women

April 30, 2009 issue

Hilary Mantel

Revelations for the West

September 21, 2006 issue

Hilary Mantel

England, Whose England?

November 23, 1989 issue

The Latest

Howard W. French

Naipaul’s Unreal Africa

A Bend in the River was acclaimed for its brave truth-telling, but it fails to imagine Africa as anything other than unchanging, untamed, and primitive.

December 22, 2022 issue

Rae Armantrout

Blend

a poem

December 8, 2022 issue

Christopher Benfey

Later Disregard

I just turned sixty-eight.

November 16, 2022

Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh

Istanbul

a poem

November 24, 2022 issue

Christopher Kondrich

Empty Spaces

a poem

November 24, 2022 issue

Ruth Margalit

Village People

Halldór Laxness, Iceland’s Nobel laureate, was an inexhaustibly prolific chronicler of impoverished village life, though he never got over the impracticality of literature.

November 24, 2022 issue

Mark O’Connell

Total Recall

Jennifer Egan and Vauhini Vara’s new novels both delineate worlds just slightly out of true with the one we know.

November 24, 2022 issue

April Bernard

Sithens in a Net

a poem

November 24, 2022 issue

Jenny Uglow

Hilary Mantel (1952–2022)

Hilary Mantel’s novels and short stories demonstrated that while the historical record can tell us what people did, only fiction can imagine what they felt and thought.

November 24, 2022 issue

Ishion Hutchinson

Far Away

When I moved from Kingston to New York, V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival became part of my internal rhythm of resistance in the city, my bulwark against losing the gift of fantasy.

October 21, 2022