Literature

Fiction

A More Perfect Truth

Claire Messud’s exhilarating new novel spans four generations of a French Algerian family reckoning with their place as failed colonists.

May 15, 2025 issue

Chris Ware

Pure Thought on Paper

Olivier Schrauwen’s graphic novel Sunday is, like Ulysses, an attempt to capture the thoughts, experiences, memories, musings, and mania of one man over a single day. It is also, like Ulysses, a masterpiece.

May 29, 2025 issue

Nathaniel Rich

Writing Like a Mountain

In the novels of the Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, people become ants and mountains become menacing gods.

May 15, 2025 issue

Andrew Delbanco

The Connoisseur of Desire

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great theme of erotic anticipation is never more alive than in the longings of Jay Gatsby.

May 29, 2025 issue

Merve Emre

Something in the Dark

Djuna Barnes’s short stories return again and again to characters suffering from love, fear, and alienation.

October 5, 2024

Colm Tóibín

The Pitch of Passion

James Baldwin was fascinated with eloquence itself, the soaring phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the sharp and glorious ring of a sentence.

August 2, 2024

Anna Leszkiewicz

‘The Small Girl’s Proust’

Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle tends to be read as a romance novel. But beneath its surface charm is a metaliterary inquiry into form, style, and merit.

July 13, 2024

Kathryn Hughes

Written by Paw

In novels and magazines from the turn of the last century, cats started speaking their minds. What if they were talking about us?

June 4, 2024

All About Balzac

Morris Dickstein

Balzac’s Novel of Female Friendship

Balzac’s The Memoirs of Two Young Wives is as much a dialectical as an epistolary novel, built on the contrasts and binaries embodied in the two women’s unfolding lives, for all their nourishing friendship.

January 9, 2018

Edmund White

A Hungry Little Boy

“Pears had a special appeal for Balzac; he often kept bushels of them at home and could eat as many as forty or fifty in a day (one February he had 1,500 pears in his cellar).”

January 12, 2012 issue

Simon Leys

Balzac’s Genius & Other Paradoxes

“Balzac’s claim to the title of Greatest French Novelist of All Time can hardly be disputed…. The total cast of his Comédie humaine amounts to some 3,500 characters (including a few animals)—in all of Western literature, only Shakespeare and Dickens approached such a bewildering fecundity.”

January 12, 1995 issue

John Bayley

Balzac Possessed

“From then on the pattern was set: an immense and increasing load of debt arising from extravagance and speculation—Balzac only had to touch a stock for the bottom to drop out of the market—against which were mortgaged the plans and profits of novel after novel. He turned his hopes and disasters into fiction as he lived through them.”

October 4, 1973 issue

The Latest

Namwali Serpell

Keeping Up with Mrs. Jones

Nettie Jones’s debut novel, published in 1984 and newly reissued, is still breathtaking and shockingly bawdy.

June 12, 2025 issue

Susan Neiman

The Conformist

Daniel Kehlmann’s latest novel, The Director, documents the little compromises that led G. W. Pabst, like millions of other people, to accept fascism.

June 12, 2025 issue

Michael Hofmann

Novels Without Food

How did a writer as unconventional as Andrey Platonov manage to write so many irresistibly interesting books?

June 12, 2025 issue

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