Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Sarah Blackwood

Children’s Lib!

A new biography of Louise Fitzhugh, creator of Harriet the Spy, recovers her queer, radical life.

May 13, 2021 issue

Elaine Blair

Averted Intimacies

Bette Howland’s work—full of companionable narrators and dry intelligence—is part of a recent wave of reissues that tests the reach of the literary canon.

April 29, 2021 issue

Daniel Mendelsohn

Words and Other Violence

Much of the force of Jenny Erpenbeck’s fiction flows from the contrast between the glacial detachment of her tone and the roiling themes of German history that she explores.

April 29, 2021 issue

Vivian Gornick

Sex, Noir & Isolation

In his novels, Alfred Hayes explored what he saw as noir’s central concern: the inability to feel the reality of your own life, or anyone else’s.

March 25, 2021 issue

Deborah Eisenberg

Awful But Joyful

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

March 25, 2021 issue

Hermione Lee

The Wanderer

Jan Morris wrote that her constant travels were ‘an outer expression of my inner journey,’ ‘fired by patriotism, inhibited by upbringing, inexhaustibly in love.’

February 25, 2021 issue

Stephen Greenblatt

A Wisewoman in Stratford

Hamnet imagines a literary legacy for Shakespeare’s wife and son.

January 14, 2021 issue

James Walton

‘A Good Year Once’

Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize–winning ‘Shuggie Bain’ is not just an accomplished debut. It also feels like a moving act of filial reverence.

August 20, 2020 issue

The Latest

Mark Lilla

The Writer Apart

Who is the “nonpolitical” man Thomas Mann tried to defend even as he couldn’t escape politics?

May 13, 2021 issue

John Banville

His Own Worst Enemy

In Van Gogh’s letters, his tone is consistently that of a man still aflame after a violent argument.

May 13, 2021 issue

John Ashbery

From The History of Photography (1993)

a poem

May 13, 2021 issue

Leslie Jamison

The Self Unmoored

The heroine of Susan Taubes’s novel Divorcing moves like a fugitive: a woman who has left her marriage and abandoned the structure of a recognizable plot line.

May 13, 2021 issue

Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell

C.V.

a poem

May 13, 2021 issue

Ange Mlinko

‘And You Give Yourself Away’

Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s obsession with the eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chronaill amounts to a search for second sight, a vision to deepen the reality of her own life.

May 13, 2021 issue

Rumaan Alam

Return of the Nameless Man

The wit and exuberance of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and its sequel, The Committed, entice the reader to reflect on colonialism, war, and racism.

May 13, 2021 issue

Sheila Heti

Asking the Right Questions

“I am interested in how much freedom a person can have—this freedom leading them to something that only they can do.”

April 17, 2021

Sheila Heti

Clarice Lispector and Love’s Apprentice

Who are these bizarre creatures, who ask of each other what no two people who are suffering from desire have perhaps ever asked?

April 15, 2021

Sean Wilentz

Lincoln’s Rowdy America

A new biography captures the cultural jumble of great literature, dirty jokes, and everything in between that went into the self-making of the foremost self-made American.

April 29, 2021 issue