Michael Gorra 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
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
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
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
Tim Parks A Text Adrift How does the death of the author change the task of the translator? July 7, 2022
Colin Grant The Enigma of Nonarrival Though Roy Heath spent most of his life in Britain, he returned again and again in his fiction to Guyana. July 21, 2022 issue
Helon Habila Crude Reality Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were confronts the often ignored messiness and violence of oil extraction. July 21, 2022 issue