Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

An Endless Seeing

Simone Weil’s political and moral vision always looked beyond her own earthly sphere of existence, which she held in more or less steady contempt.

January 13, 2022 issue

Anahid Nersessian

Love for Sale

Eva Illouz’s The End of Love presents a world starkly divided between male and female, straight and gay, sex and love, dignity and humiliation.

January 13, 2022 issue

James Shapiro

Shakespeare Noir

There are moments in The Tragedy of Macbeth when Shakespeare and Joel Coen feel in perfect alignment.

January 13, 2022 issue

E. Tammy Kim

Return Flights

Two hundred thousand South Korean children have been adopted since the Korean War. Adoptee memoirs, once full of confession and confusion, are now marked by confidence and rage.

January 13, 2022 issue

Cyrus Console

Laxness

a poem

January 13, 2022 issue

Anne Enright

Dubliners

Reading Ulysses is a kind of strenuous dreaming, very like writing fiction.

January 13, 2022 issue

Rivka Galchen

Wonderful Warnings

The three girls in Kate DiCamillo’s Raymie Nightingale trilogy assemble their own stories out of the scraps of tales they gather from their surroundings, making something new out of them.

January 13, 2022 issue

Caroline Fraser

From Hell and Back

A harrowing, suppressed memoir by Gertrude Beasley and a revisionist western by Robin McLean add up to a savage indictment of regional misogyny.

January 13, 2022 issue

The Latest

Melissa Febos

Jeanette Winterson, My Therapist, and Me

To a teenage girl just figuring out she was queer, the unintended gift of the British writer’s novel Written on the Body came with the force of a revelation.

January 15, 2022

Adam Shatz

Notes on a Mugging

My attackers came out of nowhere on a familiar street and didn’t even take my wallet. But they robbed me of something: a New Yorker’s self-assurance.

January 7, 2022

Sayed Kashua

What Can I Give My Cashier Friend at Christmas?

At this pandemic holiday season, the checkout lady at Schnucks has become my most important relationship outside family. But behind our masks, I have no idea how to celebrate that.

December 23, 2021

Maya C. Popa

Turkey Vultures

a poem

January 13, 2022 issue

Nathan Whitlock

Misbehaving Like Adults

The people in Helen Garner’s books are defined by their interactions with others; life is communal, even for those who wish it were not so.

January 13, 2022 issue

Gary Saul Morson

Falling in Love with Terror

Boris Savinkov practiced the two most prestigious Russian occupations in the early twentieth century: terrorism and novel writing.

January 13, 2022 issue

Joyce Johnson

Pearl Harbor and After

“The War,” as I came to think of it, seemed a distant rumble during my Brooklyn childhood. Only later would I feel the dark ways it reverberated through our lives.

December 5, 2021

Eduardo Halfon

The Last Tiger

Kullu seemed haunted by the tale he told me of his grandfather’s encounter with a mighty predator. But he had another history to share, one to haunt me.

November 30, 2021

Irving Howe

Finding Babel in the Drawer

“Speak the name of Isaac Babel,” Irving Howe wrote in a recently unearthed introduction, “and one phrase comes insistently to mind: a writer of genius.”

December 16, 2021 issue