Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Fiction

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

Alan Hollinghurst

The Meaning of Home

On Bryan Washington’s intimate portraits of queer life in ever-mutating multiethnic Houston.

December 17, 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

Anne Enright

Wanting Wrong

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

July 23, 2020 issue

The Latest

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

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

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

Sarah Chihaya

What We Want When We Read

“I always hope to be totally destroyed by a novel.”

April 24, 2021

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

Leslie Jamison

The Self Unmoored

The heroine of Susan Taubes’s novel Divorcing moves like a fugitive: a woman who has left her marriage and abandoned the structure of a recognizable plot line.

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