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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Larry Rohter

An Eternal Symbol of Black Resistance

Gayl Jones’s novel Palmares sees the legendary Brazilian slave haven as a story to which all descendants of Africans brought forcibly to the Americas can lay claim.

June 23, 2022 issue

Jarrett Earnest

A Proliferation of Beauties

The critic Dave Hickey almost single-handedly remade the practice of writing about art in the 1980s and 1990s, even as he provoked outrage in the institutional art world.

June 23, 2022 issue

Richard Sieburth

Early Alzheimer’s

a poem

June 23, 2022 issue

Diane Seuss

Weeds

a poem

June 23, 2022 issue

Catherine Nicholson

Improving Paradise

For Milton, innocence was interesting—a significant innovation on his biblical source material.

June 23, 2022 issue

Frances Wilson

Meet the Parents

In Claudia Durastanti’s autofictional novel about growing up with deaf parents, she is more at ease with her family’s unknowability than her own.

June 23, 2022 issue

Tim Parks

A Game of Low Stakes

In Sam Riviere’s satire of the publishing world, literary competitiveness poisons intimate relations.

June 9, 2022 issue

Adam Kirsch

Benjamin’s Rival Tempters

The correspondence of Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem reveals that despite their intellectual differences, their shared mission to preserve Walter Benjamin’s work led to a genuine fondness between them.

June 9, 2022 issue

Robert Pinsky

Cataract

a poem

June 9, 2022 issue

Sarah Chihaya

‘The Ultimate Asian Woman’

Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel Disorientation is a rollicking satire of graduate-school life, Asian-American overachievers, and the peculiar injustices of the university.

June 9, 2022 issue