Fiction

‘I Needed to Stay Approximate’

In Very Cold People, Sarah Manguso captures the bewilderment of childhood in the narrator’s flat observations about situations she doesn’t fully understand, supplemented by feral imaginings.

April 21, 2022 issue

Ursula Lindsey

Refusing Silence in Egypt

Even as the Sisi regime tries to obliterate the story of the Arab Spring, some Egyptian writers remain committed to its memory and ideals.

April 21, 2022 issue

Michael Gorra

Being Dickens

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Turning Point minutely conveys the texture of Charles Dickens’s daily life over the course of a year when he was at the peak of his powers.

April 21, 2022 issue

Colin Grant

A Country Out of Control

In Wole Soyinka’s laceratingly satirical new novel, Nigeria has lost its way and is inured to corruption and violence.

April 7, 2022 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

Caught in the Coils

In Hans von Trotha’s haunting novel, the Gestapo is rounding up the Jews of Rome, but the archaeologist Ludwig Pollak refuses sanctuary in the Vatican and wishes only to recount his memories.

April 7, 2022 issue

Clair Wills

Letters from a Scattered Place

John McGahern’s plain prose hides a pileup of cruelties and injustices.

April 7, 2022 issue

Tim Parks

A Gift for Overkill

The Dutch novelist Willem Frederik Hermans loathed pious illusions and postwar complacencies.

March 24, 2022 issue

Sheila Heti

Trouble in Paradise

Cultivating the reader’s sympathy for her characters is not what Lena Andersson is after; she is more interested in tracking their mistakes of deduction, which lead them deeper into painful predicaments.

March 24, 2022 issue

The Latest

Sarah Chihaya

‘The Ultimate Asian Woman’

Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel Disorientation is a rollicking satire of graduate-school life, Asian-American overachievers, and the peculiar injustices of the university.

June 9, 2022 issue

Tim Parks

A Game of Low Stakes

In Sam Riviere’s satire of the publishing world, literary competitiveness poisons intimate relations.

June 9, 2022 issue

Julian Lucas

The Yeehaw Papyrus

In his 1969 satire Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Ishmael Reed married the Western to the Afrocentric vogue for Ancient Egypt.

May 15, 2022

Laura Miller

Under Their Skin

Extraterrestrial living “objects” in Olga Ravn’s The Employees bring an early end to a mysterious mission in outer space.

May 26, 2022 issue

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Shadows Across the Decades

Francisco Goldman’s latest novel is a book about and by a writer journeying across space but also back in time, at least in his mind, to the places that made him.

May 26, 2022 issue

Gary Saul Morson

What Solzhenitsyn Understood

Detecting the same incompetence and self-satisfaction among the liberals of the Provisional Government in 1917 and the reformers of the post-Soviet era in the 1990s, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn feared another descent into authoritarian rule.

May 12, 2022 issue

Emmanuel Iduma

‘The Spoils of a Savage War’

David Diop turns what little is known about African soldiers’ involvement in World War I into a potent testimony on violence and guilt.

March 10, 2022 issue

Sophie Pinkham

The Freedom of Historical Fiction

The Formalist literary critic Yuri Tynianov wrote historical novels as “experiments in scholarly fantasy.”

March 10, 2022 issue

Francine Prose

L’Esprit de l’Escalier

Heimito von Doderer’s midcentury novel The Strudlhof Steps restores Vienna to a brighter era, when, for most of the privileged, suffering entailed no more than ordinary heartbreak.

March 10, 2022 issue