Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

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

Madeleine Schwartz

A Necessary Detachment

The work of Xiaolu Guo both plays with the globalization of literature and rebukes it.

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

Sarah Blackwood

Children’s Lib!

A new biography of Louise Fitzhugh, creator of Harriet the Spy, recovers her queer, radical life.

May 13, 2021 issue

Elaine Blair

Averted Intimacies

Bette Howland’s work—full of companionable narrators and dry intelligence—is part of a recent wave of reissues that tests the reach of the literary canon.

April 29, 2021 issue

The Latest

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

Karen Solie

Foxes

a poem

October 7, 2021 issue

Deborah Eisenberg

Magic Mountains

The first English translation of Adalbert Stifter’s short story collection Motley Stones brings us into contact with his transporting and ineffable mystery.

October 7, 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

Robyn Creswell

On the Road

The Book of Travels, Hanna Diyab’s memoir of his Mediterranean adventures, is a mixture of clear-eyed observation and wide-eyed innocence.

October 7, 2021 issue

Caroline Fraser

Where Sheep May Safely Graze

A cri de coeur against our current state of abject agricultural illiteracy, James Rebanks’s new book may be the most passionate ecological corrective since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

October 7, 2021 issue

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Mogul of Mystery

Robert Maxwell’s improbable transformation from yeshiva boy to British media baron and outrageous swindler.

October 7, 2021 issue

James Romm

A Journey into Homer’s World

The classicist Milman Parry’s quest for the sources of Homeric epic led him in the 1930s to the Yugoslavian bards who sang in coffeehouses and bars much as he imagined Homer did.

September 23, 2021 issue

Tongo Eisen-Martin

Clocked In Still Starving

a poem

September 23, 2021 issue

John Banville

An Affair to Remember

Julia Parry has mined a trove of inherited letters to write her marvelous, gently elegiac book about the love affair between Elizabeth Bowen and Humphry House.

September 23, 2021 issue