Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Up All Night

Harald Voetmann’s protagonists live in the distant past, but are prototypically modern: men of science who are intent on outrunning our primal nightmare.

November 2, 2023 issue

Catherine Nicholson

Theater for a New Audience

From the beginning, the First Folio helped to fashion Shakespeare’s work into a canon of vernacular drama.

November 2, 2023 issue

Namwali Serpell

‘Such Womanly Touches’

Is there such a thing as a female style?

November 2, 2023 issue

Michael Gorra

Who Are These People?

In The Pole, J. M. Coetzee returns to the novelist’s ethical and aesthetic imperative: to attempt to understand others for whom we may not, at first, feel much sympathy.

November 2, 2023 issue

Lucy Sante

Rhapsodies in Bop

A recent exhibition at the Morgan showed how thoroughly at home the poet Blaise Cendrars was among visual artists.

November 2, 2023 issue

Deborah Eisenberg

Virtuosos of Self-Deception

Elsa Morante’s Lies and Sorcery, originally published in 1948, is a slippery, feverish, dreamlike book that refuses to adapt to the conventions of what a novel ought to be.

November 2, 2023 issue

Alma Guillermoprieto, translated by Esther Allen

Ghosts of Aracataca

In a series of early short stories and novellas based on his childhood memories, Gabriel García Márquez found the style, voice, and sense of place that culminate in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

November 2, 2023 issue

Namwali Serpell

Morrison Hall

A recent exhibit of Toni Morrison’s papers raised the question: How do you mourn a monument?

August 18, 2023

Graphic Tales

A panel from Eleanor Davis's The Hard Tomorrow, 2019

Eleanor Davis, introduction by Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Sketching an Uncertain Future

Eleanor Davis is one of the very best cartoonists working today.

November 2, 2019

Elke Schulze

He Ridiculed the Nazis

The carefree world of Father and Son gives little hint of the fate that would be suffered by its creator, E. O. Plauen, who had become world-famous for his comic strips and was driven to take his own life.

September 14, 2017

Saul Steinberg: New York Moonlight, 1974-1981

Chris Ware

Saul Steinberg’s Universe

Saul Steinberg’s images grow and even live on the page; somewhere in the viewing of a Steinberg drawing the reader follows not only his line, but also his line of thought.

May 26, 2017

Lucy Sante

Virtuoso of the Tiny

Richard McGuire’s Sequential Drawings: The New Yorker Series is a tribute to the spot illustration, the unsung toiler of the magazine page.

November 17, 2016

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

Ursula Lindsey

The Ghost in the Labyrinth

Inspired by the disgrace and silencing of an African novelist half a century ago, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Memory of Men both satirizes and embraces an overwrought belief in literature.

December 21, 2023 issue

Christopher Benfey

A Leaf or Two from Whitman

The promises and failures of the American twentieth century suffuse Ben Lerner’s new book of poems and Tom Piazza’s new novel.

December 21, 2023 issue

Francisco Hernández

Two Poems

December 21, 2023 issue

Greg Delanty

To Our Indolent Cancer

a poem

December 21, 2023 issue

Lindsay Turner

The Forest/Wanting a Child

a poem

December 21, 2023 issue

Colm Tóibín

In the Streets of Barcelona

In Antagony, the Spanish writer Luis Goytisolo attempts to imagine a new sort of novel in which the streets have the force of character and urban topography has its own destiny.

December 21, 2023 issue

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Out of Time

Bill Watterson’s first book since Calvin and Hobbes envisions a medieval world on the brink of extinction.

December 21, 2023 issue

Nathaniel Rich

Writing Under Fire

In Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II, James Heffernan argues that for a full understanding of any historical period, we must read the literature written while its events were still unfolding.

December 21, 2023 issue

Ange Mlinko

Patterns of Uprooting

On opposite sides of the world—Poland and Uruguay—the poets Ida Vitale and Tomasz Różycki share a close attention to their own languages.

December 21, 2023 issue

Perry Link

A Fallen Artist in Mao’s China

Ha Jin’s The Woman Back from Moscow, a fictionalized account of the life of the actress Sun Weishi, depicts the hypocrisy of the Communist elites and the fate of those who embraced new ideals after the revolution.

December 7, 2023 issue