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

Ariel Dorfman

Clamoring for Life

Though exceptional, fully developed female characters abound in Gabriel García Márquez’s work, only in his last novel, Until August, is a woman the uncontested protagonist on her own journey of self-discovery.

May 9, 2024 issue

Francine Prose

Poem & Prayer

Despite the gravity of subjects in Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, which include addiction and an obsession with the metaphysical, what makes the novel feel light is its bravado, buoyancy, and innovative form.

April 18, 2024 issue

Brenda Wineapple

Stifled Rage

Louisa May Alcott worked obsessively to become a successful writer, which meant that despite her gift for tart observation she often retreated into homilies and platitudes.

April 18, 2024 issue

Peter C. Baker

Staying Alive

Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall is a gripping drama of survival that plays with the conventions of the “last man” genre.

April 18, 2024 issue

Phillip Lopate

‘Thus I Lived with Words’

The modern reading public has resisted relinquishing its settled idea about Robert Louis Stevenson as a romantic fantasist, but in his day he was considered one of the best essayists of his generation.

April 4, 2024 issue

Sigrid Nunez

‘An Archaic Country,’ Dark and Bright

A new collection of stories by the novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya celebrates the women of Russia, countering the frequent bleakness and tragedy of their lives with tenderness and optimism.

March 21, 2024 issue