Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

‘We Must Be Light!’

What emerges most strongly from James Merrill’s collected letters is their lightness of touch, lightness of spirit, and the quality of affection on display.

June 10, 2021 issue

Madeleine Schwartz

A Necessary Detachment

The work of Xiaolu Guo both plays with the globalization of literature and rebukes it.

June 10, 2021 issue

Rumaan Alam

Jean Stafford’s Delicious Debut

There’s a fairytale quality to Boston Adventure, a sweetness cut by the acidity of the book’s social satire.

May 20, 2021

Rachel Polonsky

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

The Latest

Brenda Wineapple

Dickinson’s Improvisations

A new edition of Emily Dickinson’s Master letters highlights what remains blazingly intense and mysterious in her work.

July 1, 2021 issue

James Walton

Selfies from Hell

John Lanchester’s collection Reality and Other Stories aims to restore a sense of the uncanny to our digitally driven lives.

July 1, 2021 issue

Joe Dunthorne

Medicine

a poem

July 1, 2021 issue

Maya Abu al-Hayyat, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah

I Burn Time

a poem

July 1, 2021 issue

Catherine Nicholson

The Triumph of Mutabilitie

Edmund Spenser’s long, daunting The Faerie Queen combines political allegory with some of the most flickering, ambiguous poetry in English.

July 1, 2021 issue

Gary Saul Morson

Dostoevsky and His Demons

Three biographers take different approaches to the great writer’s life, which often resembled his most fantastic tales.

July 1, 2021 issue

Andrea Cohen

Bunker

a poem

June 10, 2021 issue

Larry Rohter

Another New World

Claudio Lomnitz’s Nuestra América is an account of his Ashkenazi Jewish family’s persistent, sometimes bewildered search across four continents for a language, culture, identity, and place they can call their own.

June 10, 2021 issue

Shane McCrae

In the Ditch in Which the Camera Finds My Body

a poem

June 10, 2021 issue

Margaret Eby

The Gourmand’s Way

Along with his celebration of American vernacular cooking, James Beard brought playfulness into the kitchen. But an ethical opportunism is part of his legacy and the culture he helped create.

June 10, 2021 issue