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Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Ben Lerner

The Faces of Victor Serge

The radical writer’s novels are unsettling explorations of the tension between individual and collective life.

January 19, 2023 issue

Francine Prose

Carlotta’s Brooklyn

It’s a daring move, paraphrasing a masterpiece like Joyce’s Ulysses, but in his new novel, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, James Hannaham shows us why a writer might do it.

January 19, 2023 issue

Gary Saul Morson

Living Outside of Time

In Eugene Vodolazkin’s polyphonic novels, the past addresses historians to come, time seems to repeat itself, and the future brings a fundamental change in temporality.

January 19, 2023 issue

Michael Gorra

Language, Destroyer of Worlds

In what may be his final two novels, Cormac McCarthy has assembled a family chronicle out of fragments, one that has, for the first time in his oeuvre, characters with an interior life and a meaningful past.

December 22, 2022 issue

Tobi Haslett

A Dream of a Great Burning

John Edgar Wideman was once too late to produce a revolutionary literature; now he may be too early.

December 22, 2022 issue

Nathaniel Rich

Houses of Holes

Hiroko Oyamada’s novels inhabit the borderlands between fantasy and reality, an uncanny landscape played for horror and comedy.

December 22, 2022 issue

Ange Mlinko

The Transplanted Ironist

Iman Mersal’s feminism manifests not as a creed but as a tone, a disposition toward life and love.

December 22, 2022 issue

Stacy Schiff

Writing the Furies

The essayist Judith Thurman has made a career of profiling complicated, often unstoppable women.

December 22, 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

Daphne Merkin

The Golden Age of Glossies

Women’s magazines were once a well-paying forum for inquiry into the interior life.

January 30, 2023

Anahid Nersessian

Reckoning with Silence

Dionne Brand’s poetry has the weight and sonority of prophetic utterance without a hint of melodrama.

February 9, 2023 issue

Caleb Crain

Sallies

a poem

February 9, 2023 issue

Marianne Boruch

ICE

a poem

February 9, 2023 issue

Ben Fountain

White Fright

A. M. Homes’s new novel might be a satire of American politics, but should we be mainly amused, or mainly horrified?

February 9, 2023 issue

Joan Silber

Friends: A Love Story

Jean Chen Ho’s main characters like each other plenty, with all the trouble that comes with that.

February 9, 2023 issue

Neal Ascherson

Sonnets for the State

A new book recounts the history of the Circle of Writing Chekists, a group of officials in the East German Ministry of State Security who wrote poetry as a weapon in the class struggle.

February 9, 2023 issue

Francesca Wade

‘The Sanctuary of Pure Expression’

A new biography of Mina Loy shows that the roving modernist saw artistic genius as a means to self-reinvention.

February 9, 2023 issue

Ishmael Reed

A New Flame for Black Fire

What will be the legacy of the Black Arts Movement?

January 14, 2023

Karl Kirchwey

Luminaria

a poem

January 19, 2023 issue

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