Fiction

The Circuitous Sublime

Like most hauntings, Fleur Jaeggy’s books are often quite baroque, but they cast a strange spell that causes everyone to remember them as nothing but austere.

December 8, 2022 issue

Ruth Margalit

Village People

Halldór Laxness, Iceland’s Nobel laureate, was an inexhaustibly prolific chronicler of impoverished village life, though he never got over the impracticality of literature.

November 24, 2022 issue

Mark O’Connell

Total Recall

Jennifer Egan and Vauhini Vara’s new novels both delineate worlds just slightly out of true with the one we know.

November 24, 2022 issue

Robyn Creswell

Then What Happened?

Yasmine Seale’s new translation of The Thousand and One Nights has a texture—tight, smooth, skillfully patterned—that make previous versions seem either garish or slightly dull by comparison.

November 3, 2022 issue

Sigrid Nunez

Gored in the Afternoon

Annie Ernaux, the 2022 Nobel Literature laureate, has published a diary of a sublime love affair—both a quest for self-awareness and a desire to escape the self—in which she traces a familiar arc of loss.

November 3, 2022 issue

Edward Mendelson

Life, Death, This Moment of June

Mrs. Dalloway has the world-defining ambition and scope of every great epic, from Dante’s Commedia to Goethe’s Faust.

December 8, 2022 issue

Regina Marler

Uncommon Women

In Andrea Barrett’s stories, female characters with at least one foot in the sciences have to pick sides and contend with radical changes.

December 8, 2022 issue

Nathaniel Rich

‘The Italian Proust’

Italo Svevo’s late fiction has all the dark irony, self-flagellating introspection, manic obsessiveness, and unapologetic moral perversity of his best-known work.

August 24, 2022

On James Joyce

Matthew Hodgart

Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Adulterer

It is best to look at Giacomo Joyce as a private journal, not intended for publication, reflecting Joyce’s obsessions with adultery, dark oriental beauties, underclothes, laced boots, theology, Elizabethan music, and so on.

February 29, 1968 issue

Richard Ellmann

The Politics of Joyce

Joyce was not the only young man in the late Victorian period to quarrel with established powers; socialists and atheists were common enough. But for him these were adjectives rather than nouns, the term they modified being “artist.”

June 9, 1977 issue

Denis Donoghue

Joyce’s Many Lives

Joyce was an Irishman, a Dubliner, a lapsed or apostate Catholic, a heavy drinker, a spendthrift, a fancy dresser, an epicure, a pretty good tenor, a lover of Italian opera, a woebegone father, and a devoted but exasperating husband.

October 21, 1993 issue

John Banville

Joyce in Bloom

“La nostra bella Trieste! I have often said that angrily but tonight I feel it true. I long to see the lights twinkling along the riva as the train passes [the castle of] Miramar. After all, Nora, it is the city which has sheltered us.”

February 8, 2001 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Joyce: Heroic, Comic

Dirty, slippery, uproarious, demented, and hysterically funny

October 25, 2012 issue

Anne Enright

Dubliners

Reading Ulysses is a kind of strenuous dreaming, very like writing fiction.

January 13, 2022 issue

The Latest

Larry Rohter

‘Bad for Business’

In Harsh Times, Mario Vargas Llosa grieves for the path Guatemala might have taken had the United States and the United Fruit Company not intervened in 1954 to overthrow the reformist president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán.

February 23, 2023 issue

Frances Wilson

Very Free and Indirect

The intensity of experience that Katherine Mansfield sought in her short life is matched by the formal obliqueness she discovered in her stories.

February 23, 2023 issue

Austin Gilkeson

The Lore of the Rings

J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction is suffused with the pleasures of scholarship and study. Amazon’s new franchise The Rings of Power can’t sit still.

January 24, 2023

Ben Fountain

White Fright

A. M. Homes’s new novel might be a satire of American politics, but should we be mainly amused, or mainly horrified?

February 9, 2023 issue

Joan Silber

Friends: A Love Story

Jean Chen Ho’s main characters like each other plenty, with all the trouble that comes with that.

February 9, 2023 issue

Ishmael Reed

A New Flame for Black Fire

What will be the legacy of the Black Arts Movement?

January 14, 2023

Victoria Baena

A Great Variety of Selves

In a new play based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Emma Corrin plays a young aristocrat who swaps milieus, costumes, countries, and genders.

January 10, 2023

Ben Lerner

The Faces of Victor Serge

The radical writer’s novels are unsettling explorations of the tension between individual and collective life.

January 19, 2023 issue

Francine Prose

Carlotta’s Brooklyn

It’s a daring move, paraphrasing a masterpiece like Joyce’s Ulysses, but in his new novel, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, James Hannaham shows us why a writer might do it.

January 19, 2023 issue

Gary Saul Morson

Living Outside of Time

In Eugene Vodolazkin’s polyphonic novels, the past addresses historians to come, time seems to repeat itself, and the future brings a fundamental change in temporality.

January 19, 2023 issue