Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Being Dickens

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Turning Point minutely conveys the texture of Charles Dickens’s daily life over the course of a year when he was at the peak of his powers.

April 21, 2022 issue

Joyce Johnson

Jack Kerouac’s Journey

For On the Road’s author, whose centenary is this month, it was a struggle to write, then a struggle to live with its fame. “My work is found, my life is lost,” he wrote.

March 2, 2022

Kamran Javadizadeh

In Between States

In Solmaz Sharif’s new collection of poetry, closed doors are everywhere.

April 21, 2022 issue

John Banville

The Imaginative Imperative

Jed Perl’s Authority and Freedom is a defense of the autonomy of the arts against the stranglehold of relevance.

April 21, 2022 issue

Nicole Rudick

‘I Needed to Stay Approximate’

In Very Cold People, Sarah Manguso captures the bewilderment of childhood in the narrator’s flat observations about situations she doesn’t fully understand, supplemented by feral imaginings.

April 21, 2022 issue

Ursula Lindsey

Refusing Silence in Egypt

Even as the Sisi regime tries to obliterate the story of the Arab Spring, some Egyptian writers remain committed to its memory and ideals.

April 21, 2022 issue

Colin B. Bailey

A Compulsive Perfectionist

The intensely private Edgar Degas reveals himself intermittently in his voluminous correspondence, in moments of unexpected self-awareness and candor.

April 7, 2022 issue

Roya Hakakian

The Refugee’s Internal Exile

Our family had to flee Iran after 1979 and settle in the US, but in his imagination my father never left. Only I, by burying him here, have put down roots that he lost.

March 20, 2022

Essays by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates

The Cruelest Sport

A romance of (expendable) maleness—in which The Fight is honored, and even great champions come, and go.

February 13, 1992 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

‘I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness’

Serial murder has emerged as the “crime of the 1990s” and our collective fascination is matched by a flood of luridly packaged paperback books on a vertiginous assortment of killers.

March 24, 1994 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

‘Who Do You Think You Are?’

Alice Munro’s voice can seem deceptively direct, but it expresses an elliptical and poetic sort of vernacular realism in which the ceaselessly analytic voice appears to be utterly natural, as if it were the reader’s own.

December 3, 2009 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

Left Behind in Lisbon

Maria Judite de Carvalho’s depiction of the lives of women in mid-twentieth-century Portugal is executed as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy.

February 10, 2022 issue

More by Joyce Carol Oates

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Colin Grant

The Enigma of Nonarrival

Though Roy Heath spent most of his life in Britain, he returned again and again in his fiction to Guyana.

July 21, 2022 issue

Helon Habila

Crude Reality

Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were confronts the often ignored messiness and violence of oil extraction.

July 21, 2022 issue

Sarah Blackwood

Spiritual Exercises

In her most recent graphic novel, Alison Bechdel explores her lifelong obsession with fitness.

July 21, 2022 issue

Alice Kaplan

The Master of Blame

A recently rediscovered work by Louis-Ferdinand Céline has been celebrated as a masterpiece, but does it erase the rabid anti-Semitism of his later writing?

July 21, 2022 issue

Sigrid Nunez

The Lady Vanishes

The narrator of María Gainza’s new novel tracks a forger in the counterfeit art world of Buenos Aires as part of an effort to authenticate herself.

July 21, 2022 issue

Deborah Eisenberg

Condemned to Life

The austerely drawn world of Jacqueline Harpman’s novel I Who Have Never Known Men provides a richly allusive consideration of human life.

July 21, 2022 issue

Rumaan Alam

Diary of an Adducer

Elif Batuman’s Either/Or is faithful to the experience of growing up; whether we want fiction to depict reality accurately is a separate matter.

July 21, 2022 issue

Miranda Seymour

‘Turbulence and Misery’

Anguish, provoked by her acute sense of physical and social inadequacy, was essential for Jean Stafford’s literary talent to flourish.

July 21, 2022 issue

Rosa Lyster

Whose Homeland?

Damon Galgut’s novel The Promise confronts South Africa’s most significant political issue: the land and whom it belongs to.

July 21, 2022 issue

Ursula Lindsey

A Painful In-Betweenness

Syrian novelists attempt to balance the obligation to not let the world forget what happened in their country with their doubts that telling stories of the war will make a difference to its victims.

July 21, 2022 issue