Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Lauren Groff

Herring-Gray Skies

Dorthe Nors’s characters are materially comfortable yet spiritually lonely.

December 2, 2021 issue

Francine Prose

Laughing Last

In Molly Keane’s novels and plays, justice rarely triumphs, virtue is infrequently rewarded. Even tragedy can wear the mask of the grotesque and absurd.

November 18, 2021 issue

Rosa Lyster

Family Liturgies

Gwendoline Riley’s language is economical, her style cool—yet the emotional pitch of her latest novel, My Phantoms, is almost intolerably high.

December 2, 2021 issue

Declan Ryan

‘I Work and I Remember’

In Lawrence Joseph’s poetry there’s no escape from the memories of his formative, difficult years in Detroit.

November 4, 2021 issue

Elaine Blair

Hemingway’s Consolations

It’s preposterous to think of Hemingway, with his best sellers and personal celebrity, as a writer’s writer. But is it possible that this might be the best description of his status today?

September 23, 2021 issue

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Dickens’s Multitudes

Two new books examine the novelist who produced some of the greatest multivoiced fiction in all of English literature.

October 7, 2021 issue

Anahid Nersessian

The Escape Artist

Richard Zenith takes a panoramic approach to Fernando Pessoa’s biography, setting the writer’s orderly, insular way of life against the riotous backdrop of the early twentieth century.

October 7, 2021 issue

Deborah Eisenberg

Poised and Precarious

Despite the ebullience of Anthony Veasna So’s stories, they ask difficult questions about immigration, assimilation, and whether there’s ever such a thing as one’s “own” life.

August 19, 2021 issue

The Latest

Joyce Johnson

Pearl Harbor and After

“The War,” as I came to think of it, seemed a distant rumble during my Brooklyn childhood. Only later would I feel the dark ways it reverberated through our lives.

December 5, 2021

Eduardo Halfon

The Last Tiger

Kullu seemed haunted by the tale he told me of his grandfather’s encounter with a mighty predator. But he had another history to share, one to haunt me.

November 30, 2021

Irving Howe

Finding Babel in the Drawer

“Speak the name of Isaac Babel,” Irving Howe wrote in a recently unearthed introduction, “and one phrase comes insistently to mind: a writer of genius.”

December 16, 2021 issue

Joan Silber

Continually Startling News

There is a good deal to like about the heartlessness that tinges Clare Sestanovich’s fiction.

December 16, 2021 issue

James Walton

‘Everything Is Fiction’

Keith Ridgway’s novels and stories try to render life as it is before the contrivances of fiction have gotten to it.

December 16, 2021 issue

Sigrid Nunez

But I Was Young and Foolish

Hermione Hoby’s Virtue is a recent coming-of-age story in which her protagonist, burdened with guilt and yet blessed with psychological acuity and a Nabokovian eye for beauty, reflects ruefully on his young life in New York.

December 16, 2021 issue