Fiction

The People’s Novel

Peter Weiss makes a passionate case that for the poor, communism offered access to spiritual and intellectual realms from which they had historically been excluded.

January 14, 2021 issue

Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo

Deadly Myths

Magic, reality, and violence against women in Fernanda Melchor’s ‘Hurricane Season.’

January 14, 2021 issue

Alan Hollinghurst

The Meaning of Home

On Bryan Washington’s intimate portraits of queer life in ever-mutating multiethnic Houston.

December 17, 2020 issue

Jenny Offill

Seeing Too Clearly

In his new novel, Hari Kunzru reclaims red-pilling from the right. How can we wake up from a false sense of security into a more conscious understanding of the world?

November 19, 2020 issue

Colin Grant

Harlem on the Mediterranean

Claude McKay’s lost novel recounts the thrills and disappointments of lives spent along the Marseille harbor.

November 5, 2020 issue

Anne Enright

Wanting Wrong

On Miranda Popkey’s ‘Topics of Conversation’ and Ariana Harwicz’s ‘Die, My Love’

July 23, 2020 issue

Lori Berenson at a parole hearing, Lima, January 2011

Esther Allen

Fiction and Responsibility

Andrew Altschul’s ‘The Gringa’

July 23, 2020 issue

Andrew Martin

Getting Away With It

Nell Zink’s books are defined by a fervent restlessness, a desire to ignore the strictures that usually confine the contemporary novel.

May 28, 2020 issue

The Latest

Min Jin Lee

The Imperfect and Sublime ‘Gatsby’

Amid a life of disappointments, Fitzgerald’s novel was a crowning achievement. I turn to it because it gives me the sober wisdom to revise my own American dream.

January 21, 2021

Aaron Matz

Inheriting Hunger

Émile Zola’s monumental twenty-novel cycle encompasses nearly every sphere of French society, but returns repeatedly to people with a bottomless compulsion to dominate others.

February 11, 2021 issue

Ruth Franklin

A Sickness in the Air

Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind imagines the world after a global disaster, but its real subject is white entitlement.

February 11, 2021 issue

Stephen Greenblatt

A Wisewoman in Stratford

Hamnet imagines a literary legacy for Shakespeare’s wife and son.

January 14, 2021 issue

Brenda Wineapple

Modernist, Humanist, Compromised Faulkner

Faulkner’s chroniclers have to reconcile the novelist’s often repellent political positions with the extraordinary meditations on race, violence, and cruelty in his fiction.

January 14, 2021 issue