Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Hemingway’s Consolations

It’s preposterous to think of Hemingway, with his best sellers and personal celebrity, as a writer’s writer. But is it possible that this might be the best description of his status today?

September 23, 2021 issue

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Dickens’s Multitudes

Two new books examine the novelist who produced some of the greatest multivoiced fiction in all of English literature.

October 7, 2021 issue

Anahid Nersessian

The Escape Artist

Richard Zenith takes a panoramic approach to Fernando Pessoa’s biography, setting the writer’s orderly, insular way of life against the riotous backdrop of the early twentieth century.

October 7, 2021 issue

Deborah Eisenberg

Poised and Precarious

Despite the ebullience of Anthony Veasna So’s stories, they ask difficult questions about immigration, assimilation, and whether there’s ever such a thing as one’s “own” life.

August 19, 2021 issue

Wisława Szymborska

‘No One Thinks in Esperanto’

A selection from Wislawa Szymborska’s anonymous advice column.

August 19, 2021 issue

Caroline Fraser

Murder Is My Business

In the true crime genre’s latest iteration, writers, reporters, bloggers, documentary filmmakers, and podcast hosts have taken a soiled brand and turned it into a collective exercise in retributive justice, recording and correcting the history of sexual violence.

July 22, 2021 issue

Colm Tóibín

‘We Must Be Light!’

What emerges most strongly from James Merrill’s collected letters is their lightness of touch, lightness of spirit, and the quality of affection on display.

June 10, 2021 issue

Rachel Polonsky

Russian Metamorphoses

Teffi’s supernatural tales ask what we can understand about the nature of events, and about the transformative moments that thread events together into stories.

May 27, 2021 issue