Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Language, Destroyer of Worlds

In what may be his final two novels, Cormac McCarthy has assembled a family chronicle out of fragments, one that has, for the first time in his oeuvre, characters with an interior life and a meaningful past.

December 22, 2022 issue

Tobi Haslett

A Dream of a Great Burning

John Edgar Wideman was once too late to produce a revolutionary literature; now he may be too early.

December 22, 2022 issue

Nathaniel Rich

Houses of Holes

Hiroko Oyamada’s novels inhabit the borderlands between fantasy and reality, an uncanny landscape played for horror and comedy.

December 22, 2022 issue

Ange Mlinko

The Transplanted Ironist

Iman Mersal’s feminism manifests not as a creed but as a tone, a disposition toward life and love.

December 22, 2022 issue

Stacy Schiff

Writing the Furies

The essayist Judith Thurman has made a career of profiling complicated, often unstoppable women.

December 22, 2022 issue

Rebecca Giggs

The Sea, the Sea

Rachel Carson’s ocean books reveal an author profoundly engaged with the problem of how to convey ecological knowledge—and how to decenter human life.

December 22, 2022 issue

Howard W. French

Naipaul’s Unreal Africa

A Bend in the River was acclaimed for its brave truth-telling, but it fails to imagine Africa as anything other than unchanging, untamed, and primitive.

December 22, 2022 issue

Merve Emre

Making It Big

In Roald Dahl’s stories, cruelty begets cruelty, children grow large, adults grow small, and everyone is trapped in a fun house of dirty, depthless mirrors.

December 22, 2022 issue

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

Tomasz Rózycki, translated by Mira Rosenthal

Clay

a poem

December 22, 2022 issue

Ama Codjoe

Mother-of-Pearl

a poem

December 22, 2022 issue

Natalia Ginzburg and Alba de Céspedes

On Women: An Exchange

“That article of mine spoke of women in general, and said things we all know: that women are not much worse than men and can also accomplish something worthwhile if they try.”

December 22, 2022 issue

Tomasz Rózycki, translated by Mira Rosenthal

An Unexpected Turn of Events

a poem

December 22, 2022 issue

Audrey Wollen

The Circuitous Sublime

Like most hauntings, Fleur Jaeggy’s books are often quite baroque, but they cast a strange spell that causes everyone to remember them as nothing but austere.

December 8, 2022 issue

Rae Armantrout

Blend

a poem

December 8, 2022 issue

Edward Mendelson

Life, Death, This Moment of June

Mrs. Dalloway has the world-defining ambition and scope of every great epic, from Dante’s Commedia to Goethe’s Faust.

December 8, 2022 issue

Regina Marler

Uncommon Women

In Andrea Barrett’s stories, female characters with at least one foot in the sciences have to pick sides and contend with radical changes.

December 8, 2022 issue

Christopher Benfey

Later Disregard

I just turned sixty-eight.

November 16, 2022

Lucy Sante

Models for Being

A meditative essay on friendship weaves through Hua Hsu’s memoir, which is also about youth, Asian identity, zines, time, education, California, mixtapes, and more.

November 24, 2022 issue