Fiction

Agatha Christie’s Nightmares

Lucy Worsley’s biography spans a long career driven by an almost addictive need to write.

October 20, 2022 issue

Resurrecting a Polyphonic Past

The Betrothed is a kind of historiographical novel that invites the reader to enter the dynamic of reading and writing history.

October 20, 2022 issue

The Long Reach of the Satanic Verses

The violent controversy over Salman Rushdie’s novel can be traced back to the early days of Islam.

September 25, 2022

Doomed to Lucidity

Though Andrew Miller is a master of traditional narrative, he has struggled to escape the formulas of his fiction.

October 6, 2022 issue

Family Lore

In her latest book, Marina Warner uses her skills as a mythographer to tell the story of her parents’ lives in postwar Cairo.

September 22, 2022 issue

‘The Italian Proust’

Italo Svevo’s late fiction has all the dark irony, self-flagellating introspection, manic obsessiveness, and unapologetic moral perversity of his best-known work. 

August 24, 2022

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

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

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

Flaubert’s Planet

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

July 21, 2022 issue