Literature

Fiction

Wanting for Nothing

Constance Debré’s novels, whose sensibility is minimalist and at times even desolate, reject the expectations of personal growth that animate much feminist literature.

May 9, 2024 issue

Laura Marsh

Human Resources

In her new novel, Adelle Waldman gambles that it’s possible to draw out the interiority of her characters mainly by sketching their working conditions.

April 18, 2024 issue

Sophie Pinkham

Becoming One with Genius

In the translator Jennifer Croft’s new novel, a band of translators from around the world navigates romantic entanglements and their hero worship of an elusive Polish author.

April 4, 2024 issue

Colin Grant

The Jeopardy Is the Juice

Colson Whitehead’s latest novel, Crook Manifesto, depicts its characters’ perilous navigation of race, class, and crime in 1970s Harlem.

April 18, 2024 issue

Daisy Hildyard

The Long View

Martin MacInnes’s novel In Ascension reveals the technical sophistication of the newest genre fiction.

April 18, 2024 issue

Peter Brooks

In Search of His Vocation

The best description of In Search of Lost Time may come from what Proust calls dreams in its opening pages: “a formidable game with time.”

March 21, 2024 issue

Jé Wilson

Ducks in the Drawing Room

The disorienting vitality of Barbara Comyns’s novels is one reason they tend to be forgotten and revived every few decades.

March 7, 2024 issue

Lily Meyer

Nefer’s Mission

Sara Gallardo’s 1958 novel January, about a young woman’s quest for an abortion, became a touchstone in Argentine feminists’ twenty-first-century fight for the right to choose.

March 21, 2024 issue

Gumshoes, Mercenaries, and Gentlemen Detectives

John Banville

Philip Marlowe’s Revolution

“Being himself a kind of drifter, Raymond Chandler knew whereof he wrote. The mean streets down which his protagonist Philip Marlowe ventures stalwartly and alone mark the liminal frontiers between wealth and indigence, between law and some kind of order, between the city and the jungle.”

October 27, 2016 issue

James Sallis

Manchette: Into the Muck

Jean-Patrick Manchette wanted to demonstrate that the crime novel could be “the great moral literature of our time.”

June 18, 2014

Margaret Atwood

Mystery Man

In a “clues” novel, everything depends on who is where; in a Dashiell Hammett one, it was more likely to be who was who: disguises and false names were used, dark mean streets were prowled, cars were driven at speed, people blew in from elsewhere and hid out and skipped town.

February 14, 2002 issue

Julian Symons

The Christie Mystery

“Behind the middle-class English lady, remote and shy, whose perfectly appropriate occupation seemed to be the pouring of tea from a silver jug into thin china cups on a green lawn, was somebody else, somebody perhaps not so nice but more interesting. This other Agatha Christie knew a lot about poisons.”

December 21, 1978 issue

The Latest

Regina Marler

The Cuttlefish’s Play

Richard Powers’s Playground does for oceans what his 2018 novel The Overstory did for trees: it implores us to open ourselves to the ingenuity of life beyond the human.

December 19, 2024 issue

Alexander Leggatt

You Only Live Twice

Shakespeare’s characters often navigate the dangerous possibility of a second chance.

December 19, 2024 issue

Joanna Biggs

A Very Quiet Symphony

Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test seems to be about a temporary loss of hearing but is actually one woman’s rehearsal for the losses that come, unbidden, for us all.

December 19, 2024 issue

John Washington

Hopping Across the Line

In Soldiers and Kings, Jason De León uses the anthropological method of “deep hanging out” to offer a complicated portrait of migrant smugglers.

December 19, 2024 issue

Frances Wilson

Irresistible Iris

Iris Murdoch’s readers return to her to understand the relationship between high intelligence, erotic extremism, and moral virtue.

December 19, 2024 issue

Anne Enright

Alice Munro’s Retreat

In the years after she chose to stay with her husband despite learning that he had abused her daughter Andrea, Alice Munro’s stories came to reveal more than she might have known.

December 5, 2024 issue

Elaine Blair

Toward a New Realism

Rachel Cusk’s latest experiment with the novel seems too influenced by a style of abstraction she deployed more successfully in her Outline trilogy.

November 21, 2024 issue

Clair Wills

A Mind Cast Out

The New Zealand writer Janet Frame insisted on the distinction between her fiction and her autobiography, yet it was the fiction that crystallized her own isolation in psychiatric wards.

November 21, 2024 issue

Tim Parks

Hawthorne’s Mood Swings

Just as he was given to periods of melancholy and cheer, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories offer a constant back-and-forth between light and dark, town and wilderness, loneliness and society.

November 21, 2024 issue

Christine Smallwood

As I Lay Dying

Across thousands of pages, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Morning Star series presents a relentless excess of its characters’ inner lives; at its best, it poses troubling questions about the scope of human knowledge.

November 7, 2024 issue