Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Russian Metamorphoses

Teffi’s supernatural tales ask what we can understand about the nature of events, and about the transformative moments that thread events together into stories.

May 27, 2021 issue

Sigrid Nunez

‘Lost, at Sea, at Odds’

Jhumpa Lahiri wrote her new novel in Italian, her adopted language, but the greater challenge in Whereabouts was to write about a chronic depressive with seemingly no deep passions or significant relationships.

May 27, 2021 issue

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

The Latest

Michael Gorra

Promise Miscarried

Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind is a campus novel equally obsessed with the life of the body and with the precariousness of academic life.

May 27, 2021 issue

Michael Kazin

Ending the Kennedy Romance

The first volume of Frederik Logevall’s biography of JFK reveals the scope of his ambition and the weakness of his political commitments.

May 27, 2021 issue

Irina Dumitrescu

Don’t Get Too Comfortable

Eula Biss’s Having and Being Had is a collection of brief essays about how a person navigates the moral dilemmas of ownership and privilege.

May 27, 2021 issue

Whitney Cox

Lovesick for a God

A new translation of the Tiruvāymoli vividly reveals the inner life of a devotee enraptured by Vishnu’s presence and made desperate by his absence.

May 27, 2021 issue

Adam Zagajewski, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

Santiago de Compostela

a poem

May 27, 2021 issue

Rae Armantrout

a poem

May 27, 2021 issue

Alan Hollinghurst

A Snob’s Progress

A new edition of Henry “Chips” Channon’s diaries gives fascinating glimpses of homosocial desire in a hectic narrative of aristocratic and political life.

May 27, 2021 issue