Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Emerson & His ‘Big Brethren’

“‘You are yourself a sequoia,’ John Muir told Emerson during the philosopher’s trip to California in 1871. ‘Stop and get acquainted with your big brethren.’”

October 20, 2022 issue

Anahid Nersessian

LA Elegies

Two poets take up meter and rhyme to consider the city of Blade Runner and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

October 20, 2022 issue

Leslie Jamison

The Bear’s Kiss

What do we learn when the boundaries between humans and animals collapse?

October 20, 2022 issue

Mark Ford

‘An Age of Prudence’

On the centenary of The Waste Land, the archives continue to yield new information about Eliot and his life.

October 20, 2022 issue

Frances Wilson

Agatha Christie’s Nightmares

Lucy Worsley’s biography spans a long career driven by an almost addictive need to write.

October 20, 2022 issue

Peter Brooks

Resurrecting a Polyphonic Past

The Betrothed is a kind of historiographical novel that invites the reader to enter the dynamic of reading and writing history.

October 20, 2022 issue

Robert Macfarlane

A Fireball from the Sands

Ecocide, toxic masculinity, fear of death, and more: the Epic of Gilgamesh’s themes could be transcribed from yesterday’s newspaper.

October 20, 2022 issue

Jerry Brown

On the Downbeat

Joan Didion was gentle in person, and quiet-spoken, but ferocious in her honesty.

September 22, 2022

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

Hilton Als

Disastrous Surprises

Joan Didion taught me that family is always part of the story, along with place.

October 6, 2022

Emily Berry

Last Poem

a poem

October 20, 2022 issue

Tomas Unger

Alcaraz vs. Cilic

a poem

October 20, 2022 issue

Susanna Moore

‘Write It Again’

Very rarely, over the sixty years I knew Joan Didion, would she say something helpful if I asked her advice.

September 28, 2022

David Shulman

Cosmic Oceans Squeezed into Atoms

The idiosyncratic wisdom of the Tirukkural’s poetry is about aliveness, perhaps the most elusive of human goals.

October 6, 2022 issue

Vona Groarke

Passage

a poem

October 6, 2022 issue

Hermione Lee

Poet of the Dispossessed

Joseph Roth was unwavering in his passion for the vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire, which inspired his greatest novel, his hatred of nationalism, and his prophetic and courageous loathing for the Nazis. About everything else, as a new biography shows, he had violently mixed feelings.

October 6, 2022 issue

Michael Gorra

Corrections of Taste

Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries traces a shift in English studies in which close attention to language, rather than literary history, became the paradigm for criticism.

October 6, 2022 issue

James Walton

Doomed to Lucidity

Though Andrew Miller is a master of traditional narrative, he has struggled to escape the formulas of his fiction.

October 6, 2022 issue

Leslie T. Chang

Little Town on the Prairie

Liang Hong’s best-selling account of returning to her home village inspired an outpouring of Chinese nonfiction about the country’s immense social changes.

October 6, 2022 issue