Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Murder Is My Business

In the true crime genre’s latest iteration, writers, reporters, bloggers, documentary filmmakers, and podcast hosts have taken a soiled brand and turned it into a collective exercise in retributive justice, recording and correcting the history of sexual violence.

July 22, 2021 issue

Colm Tóibín

‘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

The Latest

David Hoon Kim

When I Lived in French

I loved the language and found a home within it. But France itself, that was a less hospitable place to me.

July 12, 2021

Anne Diebel

Cubicle Messiah

WeWork was hurtling into the future, with Adam Neumann leading the way. What led to its dramatic collapse?

July 22, 2021 issue

Sarah Arvio

Red Dress

a poem

July 22, 2021 issue

Ben Lerner

The Lights

a poem

July 22, 2021 issue

Mark O’Connell

Uncanny Planet

A new collection of essays by Nathaniel Rich argues that there is no going back to whatever might be meant by “nature.”

July 22, 2021 issue

Clair Wills

The Possessed

In Carl Frode Tiller’s trilogy of novels, the varied accounts of the narrator’s youth build to a judgment on the ethics of writing itself.

July 22, 2021 issue

Christine Smallwood

The Power of Questions

Jacqueline Rose’s latest book, On Violence and On Violence Against Women, takes up a subject she has not covered before: gendered abuse and harassment.

July 22, 2021 issue