Fiction

‘The Ultimate Asian Woman’

Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel Disorientation is a rollicking satire of graduate-school life, Asian-American overachievers, and the peculiar injustices of the university.

June 9, 2022 issue

Laura Miller

Under Their Skin

Extraterrestrial living “objects” in Olga Ravn’s The Employees bring an early end to a mysterious mission in outer space.

May 26, 2022 issue

Julian Lucas

The Yeehaw Papyrus

In his 1969 satire Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Ishmael Reed married the Western to the Afrocentric vogue for Ancient Egypt.

May 15, 2022

Nicole Rudick

‘I Needed to Stay Approximate’

In Very Cold People, Sarah Manguso captures the bewilderment of childhood in the narrator’s flat observations about situations she doesn’t fully understand, supplemented by feral imaginings.

April 21, 2022 issue

Ursula Lindsey

Refusing Silence in Egypt

Even as the Sisi regime tries to obliterate the story of the Arab Spring, some Egyptian writers remain committed to its memory and ideals.

April 21, 2022 issue

Michael Gorra

Being Dickens

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Turning Point minutely conveys the texture of Charles Dickens’s daily life over the course of a year when he was at the peak of his powers.

April 21, 2022 issue

Colin Grant

A Country Out of Control

In Wole Soyinka’s laceratingly satirical new novel, Nigeria has lost its way and is inured to corruption and violence.

April 7, 2022 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

Caught in the Coils

In Hans von Trotha’s haunting novel, the Gestapo is rounding up the Jews of Rome, but the archaeologist Ludwig Pollak refuses sanctuary in the Vatican and wishes only to recount his memories.

April 7, 2022 issue

The Latest

Sheila Liming

Old Story, New Money

The Gilded Age plunders Edith Wharton’s books for period-appropriate ideas but revels in all the surfaces Wharton sought to puncture.

August 3, 2022

Jennifer Wilson

The First Russian

An unfinished novel about his African great-grandfather provides the best sense of how Pushkin considered his own Blackness.

August 18, 2022 issue

Alan Hollinghurst

In the Shadow of Young Men in Flower

In Andrew Holleran’s novels, the inescapable narrowness of his world is transcended and given poetic resonance by his close and steady attention to pain and loneliness.

August 18, 2022 issue

Rosa Lyster

Whose Homeland?

Damon Galgut’s novel The Promise confronts South Africa’s most significant political issue: the land and whom it belongs to.

July 21, 2022 issue

Ursula Lindsey

A Painful In-Betweenness

Syrian novelists attempt to balance the obligation to not let the world forget what happened in their country with their doubts that telling stories of the war will make a difference to its victims.

July 21, 2022 issue

Aaron Matz

Flaubert’s Planet

Do novelists, and their readers, bear some responsibility for the climate crisis?

July 21, 2022 issue

Colin Grant

The Enigma of Nonarrival

Though Roy Heath spent most of his life in Britain, he returned again and again in his fiction to Guyana.

July 21, 2022 issue

Helon Habila

Crude Reality

Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were confronts the often ignored messiness and violence of oil extraction.

July 21, 2022 issue

Alice Kaplan

The Master of Blame

A recently rediscovered work by Louis-Ferdinand Céline has been celebrated as a masterpiece, but does it erase the rabid anti-Semitism of his later writing?

July 21, 2022 issue