Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Fiction

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

Alan Hollinghurst

The Meaning of Home

On Bryan Washington’s intimate portraits of queer life in ever-mutating multiethnic Houston.

December 17, 2020 issue

Colin Grant

Harlem on the Mediterranean

Claude McKay’s lost novel recounts the thrills and disappointments of lives spent along the Marseille harbor.

November 5, 2020 issue

Anne Enright

Wanting Wrong

On Miranda Popkey’s ‘Topics of Conversation’ and Ariana Harwicz’s ‘Die, My Love’

July 23, 2020 issue

The Latest

Sheila Heti

Asking the Right Questions

“I am interested in how much freedom a person can have—this freedom leading them to something that only they can do.”

April 17, 2021

Sheila Heti

Clarice Lispector and Love’s Apprentice

Who are these bizarre creatures, who ask of each other what no two people who are suffering from desire have perhaps ever asked?

April 15, 2021

Andrew O’Hagan

In the Act of Living

Hermione Lee, in her new biography of Tom Stoppard, has given shape to his quest for meaning, consciousness, history, and goodness.

April 29, 2021 issue

Elaine Blair

Averted Intimacies

Bette Howland’s work—full of companionable narrators and dry intelligence—is part of a recent wave of reissues that tests the reach of the literary canon.

April 29, 2021 issue

Daniel Mendelsohn

Words and Other Violence

Much of the force of Jenny Erpenbeck’s fiction flows from the contrast between the glacial detachment of her tone and the roiling themes of German history that she explores.

April 29, 2021 issue

Sarah Chihaya

All Over Desire

Mieko Kawakami’s characters live in a world that is made up almost entirely of women but is decidedly not made for them.

April 29, 2021 issue

Walton Muyumba

Floating in Time with John Edgar Wideman

In a new collection of stories, the author invites readers to sit alongside him, listening and reading in multiple directions simultaneously.

April 6, 2021

James Walton

Infinite Quarantine

Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is both topical and autobiographical, two unexpected qualities for a novel about a wicked magician-scientist exiling the protagonist to an enchanted world.

April 8, 2021 issue