Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Fiction

Anne Enright

Dubliners

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

January 13, 2022 issue

Nathan Whitlock

Misbehaving Like Adults

The people in Helen Garner’s books are defined by their interactions with others; life is communal, even for those who wish it were not so.

January 13, 2022 issue

Gary Saul Morson

Falling in Love with Terror

Boris Savinkov practiced the two most prestigious Russian occupations in the early twentieth century: terrorism and novel writing.

January 13, 2022 issue

Rivka Galchen

Wonderful Warnings

The three girls in Kate DiCamillo’s Raymie Nightingale trilogy assemble their own stories out of the scraps of tales they gather from their surroundings, making something new out of them.

January 13, 2022 issue

Caroline Fraser

From Hell and Back

A harrowing, suppressed memoir by Gertrude Beasley and a revisionist western by Robin McLean add up to a savage indictment of regional misogyny.

January 13, 2022 issue

Nathaniel Rich

Exhilarating Antihumanism

Joy Williams’s Harrow, a screwball fantasia of environmental collapse, is mercilessly contemptuous of the pieties of our age.

December 16, 2021 issue

Marina Warner

Howl

The author of a new book on werewolves has hunted across the centuries for buried items of lore, ranging from ancient Greek texts to Victorian ghost stories.

December 16, 2021 issue

Irina Dumitrescu

Industrious Habits

In Matrix, Lauren Groff continues to ask the question that has haunted her work for years: What kind of utopias can we imagine when the apocalypse is already in sight?

December 16, 2021 issue

The Latest

Yiyun Li

In the Beforemath

In his novels Jon McGregor explores the time before and after tragic events, resisting predictable narrative formulas and rescuing moments outside the chain of cause and effect from oblivion.

February 10, 2022 issue

Laura Marsh

The Nonconformist

The mood of John le Carré’s posthumously published novel, Silverview, is brisk and knowing compared with the melancholic, regretful tone of the earlier books.

February 10, 2022 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

Left Behind in Lisbon

Maria Judite de Carvalho’s depiction of the lives of women in mid-twentieth-century Portugal is executed as precisely and without sentiment as an autopsy.

February 10, 2022 issue

Vivian Gornick

Hearts vs. Minds

Why, the leftist writer Tess Slesinger asked, should people give up sex and art to make the revolution?

February 10, 2022 issue

James Walton

‘Everything Is Fiction’

Keith Ridgway’s novels and stories try to render life as it is before the contrivances of fiction have gotten to it.

December 16, 2021 issue

Sigrid Nunez

But I Was Young and Foolish

Hermione Hoby’s Virtue is a recent coming-of-age story in which her protagonist, burdened with guilt and yet blessed with psychological acuity and a Nabokovian eye for beauty, reflects ruefully on his young life in New York.

December 16, 2021 issue

Alma Guillermoprieto

Nicaragua’s Dreadful Duumvirate

Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo’s corrupt and paranoid dictatorship has destroyed the Sandinista movement’s proudest achievements.

December 16, 2021 issue

Irving Howe

Finding Babel in the Drawer

“Speak the name of Isaac Babel,” Irving Howe wrote in a recently unearthed introduction, “and one phrase comes insistently to mind: a writer of genius.”

December 16, 2021 issue