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
Deborah Eisenberg Poised and Precarious Despite the ebullience of Anthony Veasna So’s stories, they ask difficult questions about immigration, assimilation, and whether there’s ever such a thing as one’s “own” life. August 19, 2021 issue
Ingrid D. Rowland Nor Gloom of Night In Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Long Live the Post Horn!, controversy over the European Union’s Third Postal Directive reveals that the mail service is one of the most powerful bonds connecting Norwegians. August 19, 2021 issue
J. Hoberman Marvel’s Ringmaster Under Stan Lee’s guidance, Marvel marketed not only its characters but also the men who created them. August 19, 2021 issue
Lucy Scholes Where Are You Really From? With her recent novels, Sarah Moss has proved herself to be one of the most discerning chroniclers of contemporary British life. August 19, 2021 issue
Ed Vulliamy The Vindication of Sanora Babb Eighty years after her novel about farmers fleeing the Dust Bowl was shelved, Babb’s remarkable writing is finally coming out of America’s literary shadows. August 19, 2021 issue
Nathaniel Rich George R. Stewart’s Perfect ‘Storm’ By turning a force of nature into his chief protagonist, the novelist created a foundational text of eco-fiction that has only gained in power eight decades later. July 28, 2021
Clair Wills The Possessed In Carl Frode Tiller’s trilogy of novels, the varied accounts of the narrator’s youth build to a judgment on the ethics of writing itself. July 22, 2021 issue
James Walton Selfies from Hell John Lanchester’s collection Reality and Other Stories aims to restore a sense of the uncanny to our digitally driven lives. July 1, 2021 issue
Catherine Nicholson The Triumph of Mutabilitie Edmund Spenser’s long, daunting The Faerie Queen combines political allegory with some of the most flickering, ambiguous poetry in English. July 1, 2021 issue
Gary Saul Morson Dostoevsky and His Demons Three biographers take different approaches to the great writer’s life, which often resembled his most fantastic tales. July 1, 2021 issue
