Literature

Fiction

Urgent Messages from Eternity

An exhibition of Franz Kafka’s postcards, letters, and manuscript pages rekindles our sense of him as a writer deeply connected to his own time and place.

February 13, 2025 issue

Giles Harvey

‘Bonds and Gestures’

Long Island, Colm Tóibín’s sequel to his novel Brooklyn, is a concentrated study of the missed or canceled life.

February 13, 2025 issue

Nicole Flattery

The House of Self-Worth

In Halle Butler’s third novel, Banal Nightmare, the real enemy is the careerism of the millennial.

February 13, 2025 issue

Peter Brooks

Passion’s Countervoices

Balzac’s The Lily in the Valley gives full-throated voice to romantic passion and at the same time contains it, inflating its rhetoric while ironizing it.

January 16, 2025 issue

Darryl Pinckney

Baldwin’s Spell

In James Baldwin’s writing and public appearances, the social and personal, the spoken and written dissolve into one.

January 16, 2025 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

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

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

Laura Marsh

Shared Delusions

Katie Kitamura’s latest novel prizes open the question of what a family is and what pretenses sustain it.

April 24, 2025 issue

Jesse McCarthy

Return to My Native Land

Vincent O. Carter’s forgotten novel Such Sweet Thunder is a modernist masterpiece and a tribute to a lost black world of Kansas City.

April 24, 2025 issue

Thomas Powers

A Mighty Theme

Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is “the Moby-Dick of the plains”—the great book about the American West.

April 24, 2025 issue

Merve Emre

An Unsentimental Education

Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons summons the romantic vision of the university as an unblighted Eden to mock it through the downfall of one of its deceived mortals.

April 24, 2025 issue

Dan Rockmore

The Quantum Chaos of Literature

Benjamín Labatut’s writing—dizzying, unnerving, and packed with ideas about science and mathematics—blurs the line between truth and imagination.

April 10, 2025 issue

Michael Dirda

The Chronicler of Unhappiness

Ford Madox Ford’s sensuous, vital novels often drew on the events of his rich and muddled life.

March 27, 2025 issue

James Walton

Centrist Dads Unreformed

The vast social world of Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel is designed to pose a challenge to good liberal values.

March 13, 2025 issue

Michael Hofmann

Curable or Not?

The late Swiss writer Markus Werner’s bleakly funny The Frog in the Throat, first published forty years ago, is a parallel portrait of father-and-son misanthropes and seems to speak directly to our moment.

February 27, 2025 issue

Alma Guillermoprieto

A Telenovela Macondo

Netflix’s adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude has skimmed off only the melodramatic and the anecdotal parts of Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece.

February 27, 2025 issue