Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Corrections of Taste

Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries traces a shift in English studies in which close attention to language, rather than literary history, became the paradigm for criticism.

October 6, 2022 issue

Ange Mlinko

Timeless Correspondences

The great salutary effect of reading H.D.’s novels and memoirs— many brought out late in life or posthumously— is to restore her to her era.

October 6, 2022 issue

David Shulman

Cosmic Oceans Squeezed into Atoms

The idiosyncratic wisdom of the Tirukkural’s poetry is about aliveness, perhaps the most elusive of human goals.

October 6, 2022 issue

James Walton

Doomed to Lucidity

Though Andrew Miller is a master of traditional narrative, he has struggled to escape the formulas of his fiction.

October 6, 2022 issue

Leslie T. Chang

Little Town on the Prairie

Liang Hong’s best-selling account of returning to her home village inspired an outpouring of Chinese nonfiction about the country’s immense social changes.

October 6, 2022 issue

Hermione Lee

Poet of the Dispossessed

Joseph Roth was unwavering in his passion for the vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire, which inspired his greatest novel, his hatred of nationalism, and his prophetic and courageous loathing for the Nazis. About everything else, as a new biography shows, he had violently mixed feelings.

October 6, 2022 issue

Nathaniel Rich

‘The Italian Proust’

Italo Svevo’s late fiction has all the dark irony, self-flagellating introspection, manic obsessiveness, and unapologetic moral perversity of his best-known work.

August 24, 2022

Sheila Liming

Old Story, New Money

The Gilded Age plunders Edith Wharton’s books for period-appropriate ideas but revels in all the surfaces Wharton sought to puncture.

August 3, 2022

Ghosts, Writers

Claire Tomalin

Frankenstein’s Mother

As Muriel Spark points out in her biography of Mary Shelley, Shelley’s lucid, rational, and straightforward prose makes the surreal horrors of her story much more effective than the inflated rhetoric of her contemporaries’ Gothic tales.

November 19, 1987 issue

Edgar Allan Poe; portrait by Gabriel Harrison, 1896

Marilynne Robinson

On Edgar Allan Poe

Crypts, entombments, physical morbidity: these nightmares figure prominently in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, a fictional world in which the word that recurs most crucially is horror.

February 5, 2015 issue

Stephen King

The Edge of Horror

William Sloane might have become a master of the horror genre, or created an entirely new one. Yet we must be grateful for what we have, which is a splendid rediscovery.

September 18, 2015

Michael Dirda

One of America’s Best

Ambrose Bierce had no use for the refined eeriness of the English-style ghost stories of Henry James and Edith Wharton, instead setting his haunting descriptions of fateful coincidence and horrific revelation in uncut forests and abandoned mining towns.

May 10, 2012 issue

The Latest

Jerry Brown

On the Downbeat

Joan Didion was gentle in person, and quiet-spoken, but ferocious in her honesty.

September 22, 2022

Vona Groarke

Passage

a poem

October 6, 2022 issue

Wyatt Mason

Outdoing Reality

The absurd incursions of the real into the intelligent life of the imagination are central to the Afghan American writer Jamil Jan Kochai’s fiction.

September 22, 2022 issue

Sophie Pinkham

Immune to Despair

In his novels, rock songs, and social activism, Serhiy Zhadan has long been a builder of bridges in Ukraine, an essential figure in a bitterly divided landscape.

September 22, 2022 issue

Nicole Rudick

Where Does the Buck Stop?

Hernan Diaz’s new novel, Trust, incites mistrust from the very start, with the reader becoming a detective sorting through different versions of the truth.

September 22, 2022 issue

Clair Wills

Family Lore

In her latest book, Marina Warner uses her skills as a mythographer to tell the story of her parents’ lives in postwar Cairo.

September 22, 2022 issue

Deborah Eisenberg

Their Glorious Façades

Gavin Lambert’s novel The Goodby People captures the serious disorientation of 1960s Los Angeles.

September 22, 2022 issue

Dan Chiasson

Rococo Risks

With Venice, her latest collection of poems, Ange Mlinko offers an account of motherhood at a crossroads, now that art and mortality share an empty nest.

September 22, 2022 issue