Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

Being Dickens

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Turning Point minutely conveys the texture of Charles Dickens’s daily life over the course of a year when he was at the peak of his powers.

April 21, 2022 issue

Joyce Johnson

Jack Kerouac’s Journey

For On the Road’s author, whose centenary is this month, it was a struggle to write, then a struggle to live with its fame. “My work is found, my life is lost,” he wrote.

March 2, 2022

Kamran Javadizadeh

In Between States

In Solmaz Sharif’s new collection of poetry, closed doors are everywhere.

April 21, 2022 issue

John Banville

The Imaginative Imperative

Jed Perl’s Authority and Freedom is a defense of the autonomy of the arts against the stranglehold of relevance.

April 21, 2022 issue

Nicole Rudick

‘I Needed to Stay Approximate’

In Very Cold People, Sarah Manguso captures the bewilderment of childhood in the narrator’s flat observations about situations she doesn’t fully understand, supplemented by feral imaginings.

April 21, 2022 issue

Ursula Lindsey

Refusing Silence in Egypt

Even as the Sisi regime tries to obliterate the story of the Arab Spring, some Egyptian writers remain committed to its memory and ideals.

April 21, 2022 issue

Colin B. Bailey

A Compulsive Perfectionist

The intensely private Edgar Degas reveals himself intermittently in his voluminous correspondence, in moments of unexpected self-awareness and candor.

April 7, 2022 issue

Roya Hakakian

The Refugee’s Internal Exile

Our family had to flee Iran after 1979 and settle in the US, but in his imagination my father never left. Only I, by burying him here, have put down roots that he lost.

March 20, 2022

Essays by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates

The Cruelest Sport

A romance of (expendable) maleness—in which The Fight is honored, and even great champions come, and go.

February 13, 1992 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

‘I Had No Other Thrill or Happiness’

Serial murder has emerged as the “crime of the 1990s” and our collective fascination is matched by a flood of luridly packaged paperback books on a vertiginous assortment of killers.

March 24, 1994 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

‘Who Do You Think You Are?’

Alice Munro’s voice can seem deceptively direct, but it expresses an elliptical and poetic sort of vernacular realism in which the ceaselessly analytic voice appears to be utterly natural, as if it were the reader’s own.

December 3, 2009 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

Left Behind in Lisbon

Maria Judite de Carvalho’s depiction of the lives of women in mid-twentieth-century Portugal is executed as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy.

February 10, 2022 issue

More by Joyce Carol Oates

The Latest

Clare Bucknell

‘So Whimsical a Head’

A new biography of Charles Lamb, the first in over a century, marks an important staging post on the writer’s road back to respectability.

August 18, 2022 issue

Natasha Wimmer

At the Center of the Fringe

The Mexican writer Sergio Pitol shaped Latin American letters with work that was as strange and playful as his own life.

August 18, 2022 issue

Jennifer Wilson

The First Russian

An unfinished novel about his African great-grandfather provides the best sense of how Pushkin considered his own Blackness.

August 18, 2022 issue

Jorie Graham

This Vase of Quince Branches You Sent Me

a poem

August 18, 2022 issue

John Koethe

Late, Late Show

a poem

August 18, 2022 issue

Alan Hollinghurst

In the Shadow of Young Men in Flower

In Andrew Holleran’s novels, the inescapable narrowness of his world is transcended and given poetic resonance by his close and steady attention to pain and loneliness.

August 18, 2022 issue

Mónica de la Torre

That August

a poem

August 18, 2022 issue

Tim Parks

A Text Adrift

How does the death of the author change the task of the translator?

July 7, 2022

Rosa Lyster

Whose Homeland?

Damon Galgut’s novel The Promise confronts South Africa’s most significant political issue: the land and whom it belongs to.

July 21, 2022 issue

Ursula Lindsey

A Painful In-Betweenness

Syrian novelists attempt to balance the obligation to not let the world forget what happened in their country with their doubts that telling stories of the war will make a difference to its victims.

July 21, 2022 issue