Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Elegy for a ‘Separate Civilization’

Scott Preston’s The Borrowed Hills is the strangled, savagely beautiful swan song of the world of the Cumbrian peasant farmer.

October 3, 2024 issue

Alice Kaplan

The Posthumous Autobiographer

Michel Leiris’s literary memoirs belong to a form almost unrecognizable today; they are driven not by plot—the narrative arc—but by words.

October 3, 2024 issue

Kathryn Hughes

An Entry of One’s Own

A collection of excerpts from women’s diaries written over the past four centuries offers a vast range of human experience and a subtle counterhistory.

October 3, 2024 issue

Tareq Baconi

Living the Nakba

Two recent memoirs tell the story of generations of Palestinian grief and struggle.

October 3, 2024 issue

Marina Warner

Torrents of Magpies, Spheres of Hope

Throughout Rikki Ducornet’s prolific writing career, she has adhered to a Surrealist commitment to dream knowledge as well as a belief in literature’s ability to confront all of experience.

September 19, 2024 issue

Elaine Blair

Satire in a Skittish Time

In Lexi Freiman’s The Book of Ayn, a canceled writer never quite makes the case against the imperatives of cultural sensitivity.

September 19, 2024 issue

Ruth Franklin

Writing Out of Annihilation

In the Warsaw Ghetto, the journalist Rokhl Auerbach risked her life to capture the stories of the Jewish community and, by writing about the people she knew, memorialized an entire lost world.

September 19, 2024 issue

Colm Tóibín

Haunted by Fiction

In Mark O’Connell’s A Thread of Violence, the murderer Malcolm Macarthur lurks in the gray area between life and literature.

September 19, 2024 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

Gumshoes, Mercenaries, and Gentlemen Detectives

John Banville

Philip Marlowe’s Revolution

“Being himself a kind of drifter, Raymond Chandler knew whereof he wrote. The mean streets down which his protagonist Philip Marlowe ventures stalwartly and alone mark the liminal frontiers between wealth and indigence, between law and some kind of order, between the city and the jungle.”

October 27, 2016 issue

James Sallis

Manchette: Into the Muck

Jean-Patrick Manchette wanted to demonstrate that the crime novel could be “the great moral literature of our time.”

June 18, 2014

Margaret Atwood

Mystery Man

In a “clues” novel, everything depends on who is where; in a Dashiell Hammett one, it was more likely to be who was who: disguises and false names were used, dark mean streets were prowled, cars were driven at speed, people blew in from elsewhere and hid out and skipped town.

February 14, 2002 issue

Julian Symons

The Christie Mystery

“Behind the middle-class English lady, remote and shy, whose perfectly appropriate occupation seemed to be the pouring of tea from a silver jug into thin china cups on a green lawn, was somebody else, somebody perhaps not so nice but more interesting. This other Agatha Christie knew a lot about poisons.”

December 21, 1978 issue

The Latest

Merve Emre

Something in the Dark

Djuna Barnes’s short stories return again and again to characters suffering from love, fear, and alienation.

October 5, 2024

Christopher Tayler

‘The Death of Some Ideal’

The Irish novelist Anne Enright writes with great prowess and wit about women who make a virtue of getting on with things.

October 17, 2024 issue

Frances Leviston

Slip

a poem

October 17, 2024 issue

Clare Bucknell

The Fact Man

At the heart of Daniel Defoe’s fictional world is a feeling for change, of the mutability and shiftiness of modern life and the people who thrive in it.

October 17, 2024 issue

Anahid Nersessian

Speaking the Unspeakable

The Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah asks what it would mean—aesthetically, morally, politically—to write a good poem about genocide.

October 17, 2024 issue

Julius Taranto

The Father-Daughter Dance

Jo Hamya’s The Hypocrite is fundamentally a social novel, revolving around debates that occupy the public sphere: gender and generational dynamics, as well as the ethical problems with using family as grist for the artistic mill.

October 17, 2024 issue

Caleb Crain

Lifer

a poem

October 17, 2024 issue

Hannah Gold

‘Deviations and Catastrophes’

The characters in Kathleen Alcott’s stories struggle with whether to let their attachment to the past derail them in the present.

October 17, 2024 issue

Julia Kornberg

The Basement Tapes

At the end of his life, Reinaldo Arenas dictated his posthumously published memoir into a recorder. The newly unearthed tapes reveal a writer working beyond his mythology.

September 21, 2024

John Koethe

The Divinity Within

a poem

October 3, 2024 issue