Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Fiction

Sarah Blackwood

Children’s Lib!

A new biography of Louise Fitzhugh, creator of Harriet the Spy, recovers her queer, radical life.

May 13, 2021 issue

Rumaan Alam

Return of the Nameless Man

The wit and exuberance of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and its sequel, The Committed, entice the reader to reflect on colonialism, war, and racism.

May 13, 2021 issue

Michael Gorra

Promise Miscarried

Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind is a campus novel equally obsessed with the life of the body and with the precariousness of academic life.

May 27, 2021 issue

Choire Sicha

I, Phone

In Fake Accounts, Lauren Oyler paints a portrait of a person made ill by the Internet.

April 8, 2021 issue

Cathleen Schine

The Struggle and the Scramble

Cynthia Ozick’s writing hurtles forward with the force of anticipation and intellectual surprise.

April 8, 2021 issue

Tash Aw

To Forget and Survive

Is it possible to excavate trauma, Asako Serizawa’s interlinked stories ask, if the people and countries concerned prefer their pain to remain buried?

March 25, 2021 issue

Andrew Martin

Deeper into the Labyrinth

Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous books expand our sense of his novels and stories as a living system, as illogical and abrupt as the world we inhabit.

March 25, 2021 issue

Lydia Wilson

Sudden Monsters

Dima Wannous’s fiction asks where the boundaries lie between individual and collective fears in Syria, a country traumatized by violence.

March 25, 2021 issue

The Latest

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

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

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

Joan Silber

Continually Startling News

There is a good deal to like about the heartlessness that tinges Clare Sestanovich’s fiction.

December 16, 2021 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