Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Surviving by Accident

With neither cynicism nor sentimentality, Marina Jarre makes us feel the hard, dull ache of the spiritual aloneness that countless lives endure, especially in the shadow of a dramatic world war.

June 8, 2023 issue

Kevin Power

Ideal Detachments

Tracing the memories of an employee at Andy Warhol’s Factory, Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special dramatizes a young woman’s self-scrutiny in an era defined by male looking and listening.

June 8, 2023 issue

Yasmine El Rashidi

A Life of Sheer Will

The Lebanese writer and painter Etel Adnan’s urgent need to see and document and create in every form earned her a cultlike status around the world.

June 8, 2023 issue

John Washington

Journey to the North

Javier Zamora’s retelling of the almost lethal three-thousand-mile journey he made from El Salvador to the US as a child gives the experience of migration extraordinary immediacy.

June 8, 2023 issue

Joan Acocella

‘The Real World Is Not Here’

Balanchine’s dances often gladden our hearts in order to break them, whereupon they tell us that we have to go on living anyway.

June 8, 2023 issue

Kevin Lozano

The Oracle of Public Radio

In Michael Silverblatt’s long-running KCRW show, Bookworm, conversations with writers go past the imperatives of publicity.

May 6, 2023

Michael Hofmann

Bewitched by Goethe

In Johann Eckermann, Goethe found an amanuensis made in heaven.

May 25, 2023 issue

Christine Smallwood

Poor Torvey!

A new production of A Doll’s House starring Jessica Chastain emphasizes that everyone in Ibsen’s play suffers under the binding ties of patriarchy.

April 6, 2023

By Louise Glück

Louise Glück, Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 2012

Louise Glück

Winter Journey

December 17, 2020 issue

Louise Glück

A Children’s Story

October 22, 2020 issue

Louise Glück

Afternoons and Early Evenings

November 7, 2019 issue

The Latest

Francesca Wade

Court and Spark

Across her stories and novels, Susan Taubes explored the frustration and freedom of estrangement.

May 27, 2023

Nick Laird

Talking to the Sun in Washington Square

a poem

June 8, 2023 issue

Erica McAlpine

The Second Warthogs

a poem

June 8, 2023 issue

Eugene Ostashevsky

Farewell Poem

a poem

May 25, 2023 issue

D. Nurkse

The Extinct

a poem

May 25, 2023 issue

Ama Codjoe

The Deer

a poem

May 25, 2023 issue

Daisy Hildyard

Seeing Through It All

In Sara Baume’s novel Seven Steeples, two people and two dogs retreat to a rural cottage while the novel itself experiments with a nonhuman narrative voice.

May 25, 2023 issue

Larry Rohter

The Inventor of Magical Realism

It remains a mystery why Miguel Ángel Asturias’s brilliant novel Mr. President remains less well known in the English-speaking world than the many novels it inspired.

May 25, 2023 issue

Brenda Wineapple

At Odds with Two Worlds

Susanna Moore writes of the past with quiet insight, through the eyes of women who frequently move from a form of innocence to some collision with history.

May 25, 2023 issue

Andrew Martin

The Documentarian

Zachary Lazar so convincingly blurs real and imaginary characters that his novels avoid objective truth altogether, even though their prose is written like a journalist’s.

May 25, 2023 issue