Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

The Wanderer

Jan Morris wrote that her constant travels were ‘an outer expression of my inner journey,’ ‘fired by patriotism, inhibited by upbringing, inexhaustibly in love.’

February 25, 2021 issue

Clair Wills

Bildungsonline

Patricia Lockwood descends into Internet hell in her debut novel and winds up confronting America’s very real religious zealotry.

February 25, 2021 issue

Daphne Merkin

‘A Very Lonely Business’

“How any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom,” Virginia Woolf wrote. Is there a tradeoff between motherhood and artistic creativity?

February 11, 2021 issue

Stephen Greenblatt

A Wisewoman in Stratford

Hamnet imagines a literary legacy for Shakespeare’s wife and son.

January 14, 2021 issue

Andrew Katzenstein

A Well-Ventilated Conscience

The digressive, playful, and irreverent Machado de Assis.

December 17, 2020 issue

James Walton

‘A Good Year Once’

Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize–winning ‘Shuggie Bain’ is not just an accomplished debut. It also feels like a moving act of filial reverence.

August 20, 2020 issue

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

Elaine Blair

Making Order of the Breakdown

Elena Ferrante’s ‘The Lying Life of Adults’

September 24, 2020 issue

The Latest

Anjan Sundaram

From Wars Abroad, to Peace at Home

“As I’ve grown older, I’m more aware of the psychological risks we must take,” says the conflict-zone reporter. “Writing about my father represented such a psychological risk.”

February 27, 2021

Anjan Sundaram

No Direction Home

My father chose to pursue a better life for our family through migration, without ever settling and putting down roots. Now, that is my inheritance.

February 23, 2021

Molly Jong-Fast

What the FBI Had on Grandpa

J. Edgar Hoover thought Howard Fast was an un-American menace. To my family, he was just a menace, period. But his file tells a different story.

February 21, 2021

Peter C. Baker

The Bloodhound

A distinct thread of anger runs through all of Nicholson Baker’s work: anger at what people with power get up to in the shadows, anger at how they lie about it, anger at how we forget.

March 11, 2021 issue

Tim Parks

Characters in Search of a Conflict

The life of the Sicilian writer Luigi Pirandello, like those of his characters, oscillated between pathos and beffa: ironic, unexpected, crushing reversal.

March 11, 2021 issue

Colin Thubron

Escape from Fortress Crete

Patrick Leigh Fermor kidnapped a German general in the mountains of Greece during World War II. Was it worth it?

March 11, 2021 issue

Katie Peterson

Fog

a poem

March 11, 2021 issue

Katie Peterson

Fog

a poem

March 11, 2021 issue

Mónica de la Torre

Georges Perec’s Isle of Tears

The novelist and filmmaker wrote Ellis Island in order to reflect upon “the place where place is absent.”

February 10, 2021

Ben Lerner

Past Imperfect

Erica Hunt’s Jump the Clock is eerily appropriate for a time when a pandemic has suspended the normal temporal rhythms for so many of us, while laying bare our mortally uneven relationship to those rhythms.

February 25, 2021 issue