Fiction

The People’s Novel

Peter Weiss makes a passionate case that for the poor, communism offered access to spiritual and intellectual realms from which they had historically been excluded.

January 14, 2021 issue

Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo

Deadly Myths

Magic, reality, and violence against women in Fernanda Melchor’s ‘Hurricane Season.’

January 14, 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

Jenny Offill

Seeing Too Clearly

In his new novel, Hari Kunzru reclaims red-pilling from the right. How can we wake up from a false sense of security into a more conscious understanding of the world?

November 19, 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

Lori Berenson at a parole hearing, Lima, January 2011

Esther Allen

Fiction and Responsibility

Andrew Altschul’s ‘The Gringa’

July 23, 2020 issue

Andrew Martin

Getting Away With It

Nell Zink’s books are defined by a fervent restlessness, a desire to ignore the strictures that usually confine the contemporary novel.

May 28, 2020 issue

The Latest

Anne Enright

Of Angels, Saints, and Faith in Fiction

“I am interested in metaphor, that is where I get my fix of transcendence,” says the novelist.

February 20, 2021

Tim Parks

Characters in Search of a Conflict

The life of the Sicilian writer Luigi Pirandello, like those of his characters, oscillated between pathos and beffa: ironic, unexpected, crushing reversal.

March 11, 2021 issue

Mónica de la Torre

Georges Perec’s Isle of Tears

The novelist and filmmaker wrote Ellis Island in order to reflect upon “the place where place is absent.”

February 10, 2021

Clair Wills

Bildungsonline

Patricia Lockwood descends into Internet hell in her debut novel and winds up confronting America’s very real religious zealotry.

February 25, 2021 issue

Miranda Seymour

Promethean Women

Both Mary Wollstonecraft, darling of twentieth-century feminists, and her visionary daughter Mary Shelley continue to influence us today.

February 25, 2021 issue

A story by Jamie Quatro

Aubade

January 30, 2021

Min Jin Lee

The Imperfect and Sublime ‘Gatsby’

Amid a life of disappointments, Fitzgerald’s novel was a crowning achievement. I turn to it because it gives me the sober wisdom to revise my own American dream.

January 21, 2021

Ruth Franklin

A Sickness in the Air

Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind imagines the world after a global disaster, but its real subject is white entitlement.

February 11, 2021 issue

Aaron Matz

Inheriting Hunger

Émile Zola’s monumental twenty-novel cycle encompasses nearly every sphere of French society, but returns repeatedly to people with a bottomless compulsion to dominate others.

February 11, 2021 issue