Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

‘Bad for Business’

In Harsh Times, Mario Vargas Llosa grieves for the path Guatemala might have taken had the United States and the United Fruit Company not intervened in 1954 to overthrow the reformist president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán.

February 23, 2023 issue

Frances Wilson

Very Free and Indirect

The intensity of experience that Katherine Mansfield sought in her short life is matched by the formal obliqueness she discovered in her stories.

February 23, 2023 issue

Anahid Nersessian

Reckoning with Silence

Dionne Brand’s poetry has the weight and sonority of prophetic utterance without a hint of melodrama.

February 9, 2023 issue

Ben Fountain

White Fright

A. M. Homes’s new novel might be a satire of American politics, but should we be mainly amused, or mainly horrified?

February 9, 2023 issue

Joan Silber

Friends: A Love Story

Jean Chen Ho’s main characters like each other plenty, with all the trouble that comes with that.

February 9, 2023 issue

Neal Ascherson

Sonnets for the State

A new book recounts the history of the Circle of Writing Chekists, a group of officials in the East German Ministry of State Security who wrote poetry as a weapon in the class struggle.

February 9, 2023 issue

Francesca Wade

‘The Sanctuary of Pure Expression’

A new biography of Mina Loy shows that the roving modernist saw artistic genius as a means to self-reinvention.

February 9, 2023 issue

Daphne Merkin

The Golden Age of Glossies

Women’s magazines were once a well-paying forum for inquiry into the interior life.

January 30, 2023

Hilary Mantel (1952–2022)

Remembering Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel, illustration by Leanne Shapton

Hilary Mantel

From ‘Wolf Hall’

July 17, 2008 issue

Hilary Mantel

The Perils of Antoinette

January 11, 2007 issue

Hilary Mantel

Not ‘Everybody’s Dear Jane’

February 5, 1998 issue

Hilary Mantel

The War Against Women

April 30, 2009 issue

Hilary Mantel

Revelations for the West

September 21, 2006 issue

Hilary Mantel

England, Whose England?

November 23, 1989 issue

The Latest

Alan Felsenthal

Self-Portrait

a poem

February 23, 2023 issue

Farnoosh Fathi

from ‘Twenty Collars’

a poem

February 23, 2023 issue

Michael Hofmann

Found Poem

a poem

February 23, 2023 issue

Caleb Crain

Sallies

a poem

February 9, 2023 issue

Marianne Boruch

ICE

a poem

February 9, 2023 issue

Ishmael Reed

A New Flame for Black Fire

What will be the legacy of the Black Arts Movement?

January 14, 2023

Natalie Shapero

Kilowatt Hour

a poem

January 19, 2023 issue

Karl Kirchwey

Luminaria

a poem

January 19, 2023 issue

Ben Lerner

The Faces of Victor Serge

The radical writer’s novels are unsettling explorations of the tension between individual and collective life.

January 19, 2023 issue

Francine Prose

Carlotta’s Brooklyn

It’s a daring move, paraphrasing a masterpiece like Joyce’s Ulysses, but in his new novel, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, James Hannaham shows us why a writer might do it.

January 19, 2023 issue