Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Fiction

Sarah Blackwood

Children’s Lib!

A new biography of Louise Fitzhugh, creator of Harriet the Spy, recovers her queer, radical life.

May 13, 2021 issue

Rumaan Alam

Return of the Nameless Man

The wit and exuberance of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and its sequel, The Committed, entice the reader to reflect on colonialism, war, and racism.

May 13, 2021 issue

Michael Gorra

Promise Miscarried

Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind is a campus novel equally obsessed with the life of the body and with the precariousness of academic life.

May 27, 2021 issue

Choire Sicha

I, Phone

In Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler paints a portrait of a person made ill by the Internet.

April 8, 2021 issue

Cathleen Schine

The Struggle and the Scramble

Cynthia Ozick’s writing hurtles forward with the force of anticipation and intellectual surprise.

April 8, 2021 issue

Tash Aw

To Forget and Survive

Is it possible to excavate trauma, Asako Serizawa’s interlinked stories ask, if the people and countries concerned prefer their pain to remain buried?

March 25, 2021 issue

Andrew Martin

Deeper into the Labyrinth

Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous books expand our sense of his novels and stories as a living system, as illogical and abrupt as the world we inhabit.

March 25, 2021 issue

Lydia Wilson

Sudden Monsters

Dima Wannous’s fiction asks where the boundaries lie between individual and collective fears in Syria, a country traumatized by violence.

March 25, 2021 issue

The Latest

James Walton

Selfies from Hell

John Lanchester’s collection Reality and Other Stories aims to restore a sense of the uncanny to our digitally driven lives.

July 1, 2021 issue

Catherine Nicholson

The Triumph of Mutabilitie

Edmund Spenser’s long, daunting The Faerie Queen combines political allegory with some of the most flickering, ambiguous poetry in English.

July 1, 2021 issue

Gary Saul Morson

Dostoevsky and His Demons

Three biographers take different approaches to the great writer’s life, which often resembled his most fantastic tales.

July 1, 2021 issue

Rumaan Alam

Jean Stafford’s Delicious Debut

There’s a fairytale quality to Boston Adventure, a sweetness cut by the acidity of the book’s social satire.

May 20, 2021

Madeleine Schwartz

A Necessary Detachment

The work of Xiaolu Guo both plays with the globalization of literature and rebukes it.

June 10, 2021 issue

Christopher Carroll

Far from the Realm of the Real

Lafcadio Hearn’s work was marked by a hatred of modern industrial life and a fascination with what he called “survivals”—traditions or folktales that he hoped would provide a living link to a more ancient form of narrative.

June 10, 2021 issue

Jaroslaw Anders

A Dark Belarusian Satire

Alindarka’s Children captures the depths of grief and frustration that have been building up for decades under the deceptively placid surface of Belarusian life.

June 10, 2021 issue

Sigrid Nunez

‘Lost, at Sea, at Odds’

Jhumpa Lahiri wrote her new novel in Italian, her adopted language, but the greater challenge in Whereabouts was to write about a chronic depressive with seemingly no deep passions or significant relationships.

May 27, 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