Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

A Reconfigured Self

Margo Jefferson takes fractured shards of memory and pieces them together imperfectly to to create what she calls “cultural memoir and confessional criticism.”

September 21, 2023 issue

Anahid Nersessian

Poems to Wake the Corpses

Joyce Mansour, the Syrian-Jewish writer whom André Breton called “the greatest poet of our time,” is the latest female member of the Surrealist circle to be reintroduced to the public.

September 21, 2023 issue

Michael Gorra

Playing with the Past

The Fraud, Zadie Smith’s first historical novel, asks if we might all be frauds of some sort, wearing masks and performing as people who are not quite ourselves.

September 21, 2023 issue

Regina Marler

Unfrozen

In Ramona Ausubel’s latest novel, The Last Animal, the main characters move between poles of loss and recovery as climate grief blends into personal grief.

September 21, 2023 issue

Justin Davidson

Growing Up on Moan Street

The Naples of Domenico Starnone’s novel The House on Via Gemito is a hot-breathed, dragonlike city that keeps its children bound even after they escape.

September 21, 2023 issue

Lily Meyer

A Cockeyed Faith in Better Men

The strongest current running through Rachel Ingalls’s fiction is the boundary-shattering energy of female desire, which, whether satisfied or denied, she depicts as both a life-giving force and a destroyer of worlds.

September 21, 2023 issue

Jill Lepore

The Everyman Library

When my father died I inherited his library: tiny books, held in one hand, all bound in cloth, and smelling of Briggs tobacco.

August 27, 2023

Namwali Serpell

Morrison Hall

A recent exhibit of Toni Morrison’s papers raised the question: How do you mourn a monument?

August 18, 2023

Ghosts, Writers

Claire Tomalin

Frankenstein’s Mother

As Muriel Spark points out in her biography of Mary Shelley, Shelley’s lucid, rational, and straightforward prose makes the surreal horrors of her story much more effective than the inflated rhetoric of her contemporaries’ Gothic tales.

November 19, 1987 issue

Edgar Allan Poe; portrait by Gabriel Harrison, 1896

Marilynne Robinson

On Edgar Allan Poe

Crypts, entombments, physical morbidity: these nightmares figure prominently in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, a fictional world in which the word that recurs most crucially is horror.

February 5, 2015 issue

Stephen King

The Edge of Horror

William Sloane might have become a master of the horror genre, or created an entirely new one. Yet we must be grateful for what we have, which is a splendid rediscovery.

September 18, 2015

Michael Dirda

One of America’s Best

Ambrose Bierce had no use for the refined eeriness of the English-style ghost stories of Henry James and Edith Wharton, instead setting his haunting descriptions of fateful coincidence and horrific revelation in uncut forests and abandoned mining towns.

May 10, 2012 issue

Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023)

Michael Gorra

Language, Destroyer of Worlds

December 22, 2022 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

The Treasure of Comanche County

October 20, 2005 issue

Denis Donoghue

Dream Work

June 24, 1993 issue

A.O. Scott

The Sun Also Sets

September 24, 1998 issue

Michael Chabon

After the Apocalypse

February 15, 2007 issue

Michael Gorra, interviewed by Sam Needleman

Late Style

December 10, 2022

The Latest

Jennifer Wilson

Mother Russia

In Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s latest novel, Kidnapped, Soviet bureaucracy is made all the messier by maternal desperation.

October 5, 2023 issue

Devin Johnston

Poem

a poem

October 5, 2023 issue

Claire DeVoogd

Dream (as the Boat)

a poem

October 5, 2023 issue

Larry Rohter

Searching for the True Brazil

The writer Mário de Andrade advocated a lusty embrace of the indigenous elements of Brazilian culture.

October 5, 2023 issue

A.E. Stallings

‘Obedient to Their Words’

As a writer who is so obviously a real person, Simonides perhaps more than any other ancient poet attracts anecdotes and stories that reflect on his character as much as his work.

October 5, 2023 issue

Ben Lerner

The Rescue

a poem

September 21, 2023 issue

Pattie McCarthy

neap tide—autumn

a poem

September 21, 2023 issue

Eric Naiman

Webs of Style

Vladimir Nabokov’s correspondence with Katharine and E. B. White bristles with mutual frustration, but the New Yorker couple may have had a surprising influence on his fiction.

August 17, 2023