Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

An Endless Seeing

Simone Weil’s political and moral vision always looked beyond her own earthly sphere of existence, which she held in more or less steady contempt.

January 13, 2022 issue

Anahid Nersessian

Love for Sale

Eva Illouz’s The End of Love presents a world starkly divided between male and female, straight and gay, sex and love, dignity and humiliation.

January 13, 2022 issue

James Shapiro

Shakespeare Noir

There are moments in The Tragedy of Macbeth when Shakespeare and Joel Coen feel in perfect alignment.

January 13, 2022 issue

E. Tammy Kim

Return Flights

Two hundred thousand South Korean children have been adopted since the Korean War. Adoptee memoirs, once full of confession and confusion, are now marked by confidence and rage.

January 13, 2022 issue

Cyrus Console

Laxness

a poem

January 13, 2022 issue

Anne Enright

Dubliners

Reading Ulysses is a kind of strenuous dreaming, very like writing fiction.

January 13, 2022 issue

Rivka Galchen

Wonderful Warnings

The three girls in Kate DiCamillo’s Raymie Nightingale trilogy assemble their own stories out of the scraps of tales they gather from their surroundings, making something new out of them.

January 13, 2022 issue

Caroline Fraser

From Hell and Back

A harrowing, suppressed memoir by Gertrude Beasley and a revisionist western by Robin McLean add up to a savage indictment of regional misogyny.

January 13, 2022 issue

The Latest

Melissa Chadburn

A True Crime

After murder came with shocking suddenness to my small town, I started questioning the storytelling ethics of a genre in which I myself had a stake.

January 22, 2022

Darryl Pinckney

Our Lady of Deadpan

Joan Didion’s genius was at exploring the paradoxes and contradictions in the stories we tell ourselves.

February 10, 2022 issue

Yiyun Li

In the Beforemath

In his novels Jon McGregor explores the time before and after tragic events, resisting predictable narrative formulas and rescuing moments outside the chain of cause and effect from oblivion.

February 10, 2022 issue

Jacek Dehnel

In Response to the Lady at a Reading Who Asked What the Job of a Poet Is

a poem

February 10, 2022 issue

Laura Marsh

The Nonconformist

The mood of John le Carré’s posthumously published novel, Silverview, is brisk and knowing compared with the melancholic, regretful tone of the earlier books.

February 10, 2022 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

Left Behind in Lisbon

Maria Judite de Carvalho’s depiction of the lives of women in mid-twentieth-century Portugal is executed as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy.

February 10, 2022 issue

Jessica Greenbaum

Ode to February in New York

a poem

February 10, 2022 issue

Michael Hofmann

In the Pencil Zone

Susan Bernofsky’s biography of Robert Walser approaches her subject with an openness to other, previously rejected possibilities.

February 10, 2022 issue

Vivian Gornick

Hearts vs. Minds

Why, the leftist writer Tess Slesinger asked, should people give up sex and art to make the revolution?

February 10, 2022 issue

Anne Diebel

The Dungeon Master

Peter Thiel is full of contradictions—a libertarian who founded a company that aids government surveillance, a critic of tech who supports Facebook’s mission for world domination, and a defender of free speech who helped to kill a media outlet.

February 10, 2022 issue