Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

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

Wisława Szymborska

‘No One Thinks in Esperanto’

A selection from Wislawa Szymborska’s anonymous advice column.

August 19, 2021 issue

Caroline Fraser

Murder Is My Business

In the true crime genre’s latest iteration, writers, reporters, bloggers, documentary filmmakers, and podcast hosts have taken a soiled brand and turned it into a collective exercise in retributive justice, recording and correcting the history of sexual violence.

July 22, 2021 issue

Colm Tóibín

‘We Must Be Light!’

What emerges most strongly from James Merrill’s collected letters is their lightness of touch, lightness of spirit, and the quality of affection on display.

June 10, 2021 issue

Rachel Polonsky

Russian Metamorphoses

Teffi’s supernatural tales ask what we can understand about the nature of events, and about the transformative moments that thread events together into stories.

May 27, 2021 issue

The Latest

Fintan O’Toole

Ireland’s Coming of Age and Mine

For a Dublin kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, the whole experience was mirrored in the nation’s quest for identity.

October 18, 2021

Clair Wills

The Wages of Virtue

Chastity seems like a simple concept, but a new history proposes that it has always been a shifting and malleable virtue.

November 4, 2021 issue

Richie Hofmann

At the Rustic Hamlet Built in 1783 for Marie Antoinette, Last Queen of France

a poem

November 4, 2021 issue

Pankaj Mishra

Writing the Other America

Class divisions inflict lifelong scars in Elizabeth Strout’s fiction, especially when the psychic damage is not acknowledged.

November 4, 2021 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

‘Magic Sayings by the Thousands’

At the heart of the Kalevala is the shamanistic power of words to transform, lead astray, destroy, create, or bring back to life.

November 4, 2021 issue

Audrey Wollen

Not to Be

A Matter of Death and Life presents the closing scenes of a long marriage as both an informal diary and an instructive text.

November 4, 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

Assaf Sharon

‘This Obstinate Little Man’

Tom Segev’s biography of David Ben-Gurion depicts a man who intended to become a Zionist Lenin but ended up “an Israeli King Lear.”

November 4, 2021 issue

Frances Wilson

The Double Bookkeeper

A new biography of Patricia Highsmith and a new edition of her journals give us a personal history of twentieth-century sexual control, of lives lived not in the closet but in the cellar.

November 4, 2021 issue

Susan Barba

For the Growers and the Grocers

a poem

November 4, 2021 issue