Fiction

Ideal Detachments

Tracing the memories of an employee at Andy Warhol’s Factory, Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special dramatizes a young woman’s self-scrutiny in an era defined by male looking and listening.

June 8, 2023 issue

Brenda Wineapple

At Odds with Two Worlds

Susanna Moore writes of the past with quiet insight, through the eyes of women who frequently move from a form of innocence to some collision with history.

May 25, 2023 issue

Larry Rohter

The Inventor of Magical Realism

It remains a mystery why Miguel Ángel Asturias’s brilliant novel Mr. President remains less well known in the English-speaking world than the many novels it inspired.

May 25, 2023 issue

Ariel Dorfman

A Profusion of Poets

In Chilean Poet, Alejandro Zambra goes beyond his habitual minimalism to portray the chaotic commotion of today’s Chile.

May 11, 2023 issue

Daisy Hildyard

Seeing Through It All

In Sara Baume’s novel Seven Steeples, two people and two dogs retreat to a rural cottage while the novel itself experiments with a nonhuman narrative voice.

May 25, 2023 issue

Andrew Martin

The Documentarian

Zachary Lazar so convincingly blurs real and imaginary characters that his novels avoid objective truth altogether, even though their prose is written like a journalist’s.

May 25, 2023 issue

Nicole Rudick

Les Enfants Terribles

In Anne Garréta’s novels, her playful forms are the means of exploring and elucidating ideas about gender, consciousness, and memory.

May 11, 2023 issue

Christine Smallwood

The Exorcist

Bret Easton Ellis’s novels are filled with beautiful actors in nightmarish dreamscapes who seem innocent but are revealed to be guilty.

April 6, 2023 issue

On John le Carré

Christian Caryl

Le Carré’s War on Terror

August 12, 2004 issue

John le Carré, Beirut, Lebanon, 1983; photograph by Don McCullin

Neal Ascherson

Which John le Carré?

October 13, 2016 issue

Diane Johnson

Missionary

May 20, 1999 issue

V.S. Pritchett

A Spy Romance

February 7, 1980 issue

Patrick Stewart as the Soviet spymaster Karla and Alec Guinness as the British spy George Smiley in the BBC’s adaptation of John le Carré’s novel Smiley’s People, 1982

Fintan O’Toole

The Real Men of England

June 6, 2013 issue

David Remnick

Le Carré’s New War

August 12, 1993 issue

Louis Menand

Under Western Eyes

April 20, 1995 issue

Hilary Mantel

The Devil’s Playground

July 19, 2001 issue

The Latest

Jennifer Wilson

Mother Russia

In Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s latest novel, Kidnapped, Soviet bureaucracy is made all the messier by maternal desperation.

October 5, 2023 issue

Larry Rohter

Searching for the True Brazil

The writer Mário de Andrade advocated a lusty embrace of the indigenous elements of Brazilian culture.

October 5, 2023 issue

Michael Gorra

Playing with the Past

The Fraud, Zadie Smith’s first historical novel, asks if we might all be frauds of some sort, wearing masks and performing as people who are not quite ourselves.

September 21, 2023 issue

Regina Marler

Unfrozen

In Ramona Ausubel’s latest novel, The Last Animal, the main characters move between poles of loss and recovery as climate grief blends into personal grief.

September 21, 2023 issue

Justin Davidson

Growing Up on Moan Street

The Naples of Domenico Starnone’s novel The House on Via Gemito is a hot-breathed, dragonlike city that keeps its children bound even after they escape.

September 21, 2023 issue

Lily Meyer

A Cockeyed Faith in Better Men

The strongest current running through Rachel Ingalls’s fiction is the boundary-shattering energy of female desire, which, whether satisfied or denied, she depicts as both a life-giving force and a destroyer of worlds.

September 21, 2023 issue

Namwali Serpell

Morrison Hall

A recent exhibit of Toni Morrison’s papers raised the question: How do you mourn a monument?

August 18, 2023

Eric Naiman

Webs of Style

Vladimir Nabokov’s correspondence with Katharine and E. B. White bristles with mutual frustration, but the New Yorker couple may have had a surprising influence on his fiction.

August 17, 2023