Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Fiction

Leila Slimani; illustration by Johnalynn Holland

Ursula Lindsey

Family Values

The women in Leila Slimani’s novels are unhappy.

July 23, 2020 issue

St. Peter’s Cemetery, site of William Faulkner’s grave, Oxford, Mississippi, 1982

Michael Gorra

Jim Crow & William Faulkner

Faulkner didn’t enjoy much local popularity when he was alive, not even after he won the Nobel Prize. He told too many inconvenient truths, and even some of his relatives saw him as writing “dirty books for Yankees.”

August 28, 2020

Anne Enright

Wanting Wrong

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

July 23, 2020 issue

Esther Allen

Fiction and Responsibility

Andrew Altschul’s ‘The Gringa’

July 23, 2020 issue

Clair Wills

A Woman’s Performance

July 2, 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

Anton Chekhov in Yalta, 1900; Charles Dickens in daguerreotype by Antoine Francois Jean Claudet, London, circa 1852

Tim Parks

A Novel Approach to Literary Categories

Why do we categorize novels as we do? Fantasy, Chick Lit, Crime, Romance, Literary, Gothic, Feminist… I want to propose a different way of categorizing novels—something that came to me after reading Dickens and Chekhov in quick succession.

May 25, 2020

Hervé Guibert at home, Paris, September 1987

Andrew Durbin

Hervé Guibert: Living Without a Vaccine

Disease is conspiratorial, never egalitarian, always crawling along social fissures.

June 12, 2020

The Latest

Residents of Ganei Tikvah, near Tel Aviv, Israel, 1982

Ruth Margalit

Women Not at Home

Ronit Matalon’s Israeli novels follow immigrant families much like her own.

November 5, 2020 issue

Nicole Krauss; illustration by Ellie Foreman-Peck

Sigrid Nunez

Disorders of the Heart

In her new story collection, Nicole Krauss is at her strongest when she sets aside sensational plot devices and chronicles the everyday.

November 5, 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

Carmen Boullosa; illustration by Johnalynn Holland

Yiyun Li

Anna Karenina’s Children

Carmen Boullosa’s ‘Book of Anna’ gives life to the next generation of Tolstoy’s characters.

November 5, 2020 issue

Marilynne Robinson; illustration by Hope Gangloff

Hermione Lee

Sympathy for the Devil

There is a profound issue of freedom at the core of Marilynne Robinson’s novels. Can we change our lives?

October 22, 2020 issue

Robyn Creswell

The Body and the Border

October 22, 2020 issue

Merve Emre

The Meticulous One

Her novels cast a pitiless light on the relationship between patriarchy and fascism.

October 22, 2020 issue

Gary Younge

The Bleak Resonance of ‘Native Son’

One of the reasons Richard Wright’s Native Son remains an enduring classic is because while the racial power structure outlined in the book has evolved over the years, its basic underpinnings remain recognizable even eighty years later.

October 1, 2020