Michael Gorra Being Dickens Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Turning Point minutely conveys the texture of Charles Dickens’s daily life over the course of a year when he was at the peak of his powers. April 21, 2022 issue
Joyce Johnson Jack Kerouac’s Journey For On the Road’s author, whose centenary is this month, it was a struggle to write, then a struggle to live with its fame. “My work is found, my life is lost,” he wrote. March 2, 2022
Kamran Javadizadeh In Between States In Solmaz Sharif’s new collection of poetry, closed doors are everywhere. April 21, 2022 issue
John Banville The Imaginative Imperative Jed Perl’s Authority and Freedom is a defense of the autonomy of the arts against the stranglehold of relevance. April 21, 2022 issue
Nicole Rudick ‘I Needed to Stay Approximate’ In Very Cold People, Sarah Manguso captures the bewilderment of childhood in the narrator’s flat observations about situations she doesn’t fully understand, supplemented by feral imaginings. April 21, 2022 issue
Ursula Lindsey Refusing Silence in Egypt Even as the Sisi regime tries to obliterate the story of the Arab Spring, some Egyptian writers remain committed to its memory and ideals. April 21, 2022 issue
Colin B. Bailey A Compulsive Perfectionist The intensely private Edgar Degas reveals himself intermittently in his voluminous correspondence, in moments of unexpected self-awareness and candor. April 7, 2022 issue
Roya Hakakian The Refugee’s Internal Exile Our family had to flee Iran after 1979 and settle in the US, but in his imagination my father never left. Only I, by burying him here, have put down roots that he lost. March 20, 2022
Joyce Carol Oates The Cruelest Sport A romance of (expendable) maleness—in which The Fight is honored, and even great champions come, and go. February 13, 1992 issue
Joyce Carol Oates ‘I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness’ Serial murder has emerged as the “crime of the 1990s” and our collective fascination is matched by a flood of luridly packaged paperback books on a vertiginous assortment of killers. March 24, 1994 issue
Joyce Carol Oates ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ Alice Munro’s voice can seem deceptively direct, but it expresses an elliptical and poetic sort of vernacular realism in which the ceaselessly analytic voice appears to be utterly natural, as if it were the reader’s own. December 3, 2009 issue
Joyce Carol Oates Left Behind in Lisbon Maria Judite de Carvalho’s depiction of the lives of women in mid-twentieth-century Portugal is executed as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy. February 10, 2022 issue
Colin Grant The Enigma of Nonarrival Though Roy Heath spent most of his life in Britain, he returned again and again in his fiction to Guyana. July 21, 2022 issue
Helon Habila Crude Reality Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were confronts the often ignored messiness and violence of oil extraction. July 21, 2022 issue
Sarah Blackwood Spiritual Exercises In her most recent graphic novel, Alison Bechdel explores her lifelong obsession with fitness. July 21, 2022 issue
Alice Kaplan The Master of Blame A recently rediscovered work by Louis-Ferdinand Céline has been celebrated as a masterpiece, but does it erase the rabid anti-Semitism of his later writing? July 21, 2022 issue
Sigrid Nunez The Lady Vanishes The narrator of María Gainza’s new novel tracks a forger in the counterfeit art world of Buenos Aires as part of an effort to authenticate herself. July 21, 2022 issue
Deborah Eisenberg Condemned to Life The austerely drawn world of Jacqueline Harpman’s novel I Who Have Never Known Men provides a richly allusive consideration of human life. July 21, 2022 issue
Rumaan Alam Diary of an Adducer Elif Batuman’s Either/Or is faithful to the experience of growing up; whether we want fiction to depict reality accurately is a separate matter. July 21, 2022 issue
Miranda Seymour ‘Turbulence and Misery’ Anguish, provoked by her acute sense of physical and social inadequacy, was essential for Jean Stafford’s literary talent to flourish. July 21, 2022 issue
Rosa Lyster Whose Homeland? Damon Galgut’s novel The Promise confronts South Africa’s most significant political issue: the land and whom it belongs to. July 21, 2022 issue
Ursula Lindsey A Painful In-Betweenness Syrian novelists attempt to balance the obligation to not let the world forget what happened in their country with their doubts that telling stories of the war will make a difference to its victims. July 21, 2022 issue