Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Anahid Nersessian

The Secret Agent

Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel tells the story of a spy-for-hire who infiltrates the ranks of a radical French commune.

September 19, 2024 issue

Lola Seaton

Major Details

In Ordinary Human Failings, Megan Nolan works to balance her novel’s ambitious scale and grave themes with an attention to emotional minutiae.

September 19, 2024 issue

Laura Marsh

Not So Bad Guys

Joseph O’Neill’s new novel, Godwin, is a workplace drama that also manages to animate the forces that are fracturing our politics.

September 19, 2024 issue

Regina Marler

Culpability and the Culture

In Francine Prose’s memoir 1974, she recounts a brief, intense relationship with one of the men behind the leak of the Pentagon Papers.

September 19, 2024 issue

Marina Warner

Torrents of Magpies, Spheres of Hope

Throughout Rikki Ducornet’s prolific writing career, she has adhered to a Surrealist commitment to dream knowledge as well as a belief in literature’s ability to confront all of experience.

September 19, 2024 issue

Charlie Lee

Between a Joke & a Prophecy

Ed Park’s latest book—rich with errant wordplay, historical high jinks, and a fixation on the clandestine and conspiratorial—takes its place in the great tradition of the American systems novel.

September 19, 2024 issue

Rumaan Alam

Monsters Real & Imaginary

In a novel that fuses horror with historical fiction, Victor LaValle explores the lives of African American women who went west around the turn of the twentieth century.

September 19, 2024 issue

Colm Tóibín

Haunted by Fiction

In Mark O’Connell’s A Thread of Violence, the murderer Malcolm Macarthur lurks in the gray area between life and literature.

September 19, 2024 issue

Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023)

Michael Gorra

Language, Destroyer of Worlds

December 22, 2022 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

The Treasure of Comanche County

October 20, 2005 issue

Denis Donoghue

Dream Work

June 24, 1993 issue

A.O. Scott

The Sun Also Sets

September 24, 1998 issue

Michael Chabon

After the Apocalypse

February 15, 2007 issue

Michael Gorra, interviewed by Sam Needleman

Late Style

December 10, 2022

Gumshoes, Mercenaries, and Gentlemen Detectives

John Banville

Philip Marlowe’s Revolution

“Being himself a kind of drifter, Raymond Chandler knew whereof he wrote. The mean streets down which his protagonist Philip Marlowe ventures stalwartly and alone mark the liminal frontiers between wealth and indigence, between law and some kind of order, between the city and the jungle.”

October 27, 2016 issue

James Sallis

Manchette: Into the Muck

Jean-Patrick Manchette wanted to demonstrate that the crime novel could be “the great moral literature of our time.”

June 18, 2014

Margaret Atwood

Mystery Man

In a “clues” novel, everything depends on who is where; in a Dashiell Hammett one, it was more likely to be who was who: disguises and false names were used, dark mean streets were prowled, cars were driven at speed, people blew in from elsewhere and hid out and skipped town.

February 14, 2002 issue

Julian Symons

The Christie Mystery

“Behind the middle-class English lady, remote and shy, whose perfectly appropriate occupation seemed to be the pouring of tea from a silver jug into thin china cups on a green lawn, was somebody else, somebody perhaps not so nice but more interesting. This other Agatha Christie knew a lot about poisons.”

December 21, 1978 issue

The Latest

John Koethe

The Divinity Within

a poem

October 3, 2024 issue

Forrest Gander

from Mojave Ghost

a poem

October 3, 2024 issue

Kathryn Hughes

An Entry of One’s Own

A collection of excerpts from women’s diaries written over the past four centuries offers a vast range of human experience and a subtle counterhistory.

October 3, 2024 issue