Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Nicole Krauss; illustration by Ellie Foreman-Peck

Disorders of the Heart

In her new story collection, Nicole Krauss is at her strongest when she sets aside sensational plot devices and chronicles the everyday.

November 5, 2020 issue

The writer Marie de France, who lived in England in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, pictured in a collection of poems in old French, from an illuminated manuscript copied in Paris circa 1285–1292

Mary Wellesley

Our Literary Foremothers

Diane Watt, a professor of medieval literature, shows that the earliest English women writers lived centuries before Julian of Norwich or Margery Kempe.

October 22, 2020 issue

Marilynne Robinson; illustration by Hope Gangloff

Hermione Lee

Sympathy for the Devil

There is a profound issue of freedom at the core of Marilynne Robinson’s novels. Can we change our lives?

October 22, 2020 issue

Merve Emre

The Meticulous One

Her novels cast a pitiless light on the relationship between patriarchy and fascism.

October 22, 2020 issue

Madeleine Thien

Poems Without an ‘I’

In Chinese poetry, fiction, and philosophy, the “I” is not the nerve center from which thought and knowledge begin.

October 8, 2020 issue

Elaine Blair

Making Order of the Breakdown

Elena Ferrante’s ‘The Lying Life of Adults’

September 24, 2020 issue

Gary Younge

The Bleak Resonance of ‘Native Son’

One of the reasons Richard Wright’s Native Son remains an enduring classic is because while the racial power structure outlined in the book has evolved over the years, its basic underpinnings remain recognizable even eighty years later.

October 1, 2020

Paul Cézanne: Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses, circa 1890

Matthew Bevis

Kay Ryan, ‘Giddy with Thinking’

The poet Kay Ryan’s essays on literature are so deliriously good, so in excess of usefulness, that they’re often on their way to poetry.

September 26, 2020

The Latest

Residents of Ganei Tikvah, near Tel Aviv, Israel, 1982

Ruth Margalit

Women Not at Home

Ronit Matalon’s Israeli novels follow immigrant families much like her own.

November 5, 2020 issue

Nellie Hermann

Cancer Under Capitalism

In ‘The Undying,’ Anne Boyer rejects the conventions of the cancer memoir in favor of a manifesto.

November 5, 2020 issue

Maureen N. McLane

Power

a poem

November 5, 2020 issue

Marie-Antoinette; unfinished portrait by Alexander Kucharsky, 1791–1792

Lynn Hunt

Marie Antoinette: Why Was She So Hated?

How Marie Antoinette tried to save the monarchy.

November 5, 2020 issue

Ange Mlinko

Naples, Florida

a poem

November 5, 2020 issue

Colin Grant

Harlem on the Mediterranean

Claude McKay’s lost novel recounts the thrills and disappointments of lives spent along the Marseille harbor.

November 5, 2020 issue

Carmen Boullosa; illustration by Johnalynn Holland

Yiyun Li

Anna Karenina’s Children

Carmen Boullosa’s ‘Book of Anna’ gives life to the next generation of Tolstoy’s characters.

November 5, 2020 issue

Maggie Doherty

Bella Abzug’s Fight for a Broader Feminism

On the feisty congresswoman’s posthumous return to the spotlight.

November 5, 2020 issue

Tim Parks

Whatever It Takes

“Is Machiavelli good, then, or is he evil?” asks the French scholar Patrick Boucheron.

October 22, 2020 issue

The stones of Callanish, Isle of Lewis, Scotland, 2010

Hugh Raffles

The Stones of Lewis

A line of monoliths once stretched from this “Stonehenge of the North” to the large outcrop of Lewisian gneiss that I used to climb from my sister Franki’s house.

October 9, 2020