Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Departments on the Defensive

A new book by John Guillory explores the history of literary studies and casts a despairing eye at the future of literary criticism.

March 9, 2023 issue

Michael Dirda

‘Devilish Agencies at Work’

Walter de la Mare, a poet and writer of weird tales, once counted T. S. Eliot and Graham Greene among his admirers, and now his ghost stories persist with an underground influence.

March 9, 2023 issue

Michael Gorra

Having the Last Word

The sketches in Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures are as close as she ever came to the autobiography she wouldn’t or couldn’t write.

March 9, 2023 issue

Natasha Wimmer

The Friction of Language

The novelist Yoko Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and German, often makes translation one of her central themes.

March 9, 2023 issue

Larry Rohter

‘Bad for Business’

In Harsh Times, Mario Vargas Llosa grieves for the path Guatemala might have taken had the United States and the United Fruit Company not intervened in 1954 to overthrow the reformist president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán.

February 23, 2023 issue

Tatiana Hollier

Enheduanna’s Brutal Muse

The poetry of the oldest known author, an Akkadian priestess in ancient Mesopotamia, transformed a goddess of fertility into a deity of destruction.

February 16, 2023

Austin Gilkeson

The Lore of the Rings

J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction is suffused with the pleasures of scholarship and study. Amazon’s new franchise The Rings of Power can’t sit still.

January 24, 2023

Ishmael Reed

A New Flame for Black Fire

What will be the legacy of the Black Arts Movement?

January 14, 2023

Hilary Mantel (1952–2022)

Remembering Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel, illustration by Leanne Shapton

Hilary Mantel

From ‘Wolf Hall’

July 17, 2008 issue

Hilary Mantel

The Perils of Antoinette

January 11, 2007 issue

Hilary Mantel

Not ‘Everybody’s Dear Jane’

February 5, 1998 issue

Hilary Mantel

The War Against Women

April 30, 2009 issue

Hilary Mantel

Revelations for the West

September 21, 2006 issue

Hilary Mantel

England, Whose England?

November 23, 1989 issue

The Latest

Tim Parks

DeepL Edizioni

As machine translation software grows more sophisticated, could it entirely replace human translators?

March 22, 2023

Frances Wilson

Descriptions of a Struggle

Kafka’s diaries—made up of false starts, stray thoughts, self-doubts, internal dialogues, dreams, doodles, aphorisms, drafts of stories, character sketches, and scenes from family life—are often very funny.

April 6, 2023 issue

Christine Smallwood

The Exorcist

Bret Easton Ellis’s novels are filled with beautiful actors in nightmarish dreamscapes who seem innocent but are revealed to be guilty.

April 6, 2023 issue

Anahid Nersessian

The Couple Form

Two new poetry collections embrace the potential of traditional forms and of breaking away from them.

April 6, 2023 issue

Darryl Pinckney

Zimbabwe’s Wounds of Empire

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novels and essays are marked by her struggle against gender hierarchies and the legacies of colonialism.

April 6, 2023 issue

Andrea Cohen

Purchase

a poem

April 6, 2023 issue

Oleh Kostarev, translated by Tatiana Retivov

An Airplane or a Helicopter

a poem

April 6, 2023 issue

Zuyi Zhao

The Garden Between Days

a poem

April 6, 2023 issue

Alejandro Chacoff

The Unbearable Weight of Levity

In Clarice Lispector’s newspaper columns and crônicas, she seems sensorially overcharged by the quotidian, needing only the tiniest slice of existence to feed her writing.

April 6, 2023 issue