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

Christine Smallwood

As I Lay Dying

Across thousands of pages, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Morning Star series presents a relentless excess of its characters’ inner lives; at its best, it poses troubling questions about the scope of human knowledge.

November 7, 2024 issue

Nicole Rudick

‘A Woman Who Wins’

In her series of historical novels about the life of Saint Hilda of Whitby, Nicola Griffith explores how a woman of modest means became one of the most influential people in seventh-century Britain.

November 7, 2024 issue

Fintan O’Toole

Playing for Time

With the boisterous energy of direct speech, the novelist Ferdia Lennon takes on both the playfulness and the harsh realism of Euripides.

November 7, 2024 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

Christopher Tayler

‘The Death of Some Ideal’

The Irish novelist Anne Enright writes with great prowess and wit about women who make a virtue of getting on with things.

October 17, 2024 issue

Clare Bucknell

The Fact Man

At the heart of Daniel Defoe’s fictional world is a feeling for change, of the mutability and shiftiness of modern life and the people who thrive in it.

October 17, 2024 issue

Julius Taranto

The Father-Daughter Dance

Jo Hamya’s The Hypocrite is fundamentally a social novel, revolving around debates that occupy the public sphere: gender and generational dynamics, as well as the ethical problems with using family as grist for the artistic mill.

October 17, 2024 issue