Literature

In Translation

The Dream of the Raised Arm

In early Thirties Germany, as the Nazi threat grew, the state’s propaganda machine began to penetrate the dream life of its citizenry. What of our dreams today, under the influence of the algorithms? And what will come with the return of Donald Trump?

December 5, 2024 issue

Christine Smallwood

As I Lay Dying

Across thousands of pages, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Morning Star series presents a relentless excess of its characters’ inner lives; at its best, it poses troubling questions about the scope of human knowledge.

November 7, 2024 issue

Alice Kaplan

The Posthumous Autobiographer

Michel Leiris’s literary memoirs belong to a form almost unrecognizable today; they are driven not by plot—the narrative arc—but by words.

October 3, 2024 issue

Robyn Creswell

Bewildered Rhapsodies

The difficult history of translating a miraculous text

February 13, 2025 issue

Deborah Eisenberg

Urgent Messages from Eternity

An exhibition of Franz Kafka’s postcards, letters, and manuscript pages rekindles our sense of him as a writer deeply connected to his own time and place.

February 13, 2025 issue

Peter Brooks

Passion’s Countervoices

Balzac’s The Lily in the Valley gives full-throated voice to romantic passion and at the same time contains it, inflating its rhetoric while ironizing it.

January 16, 2025 issue

Ruth Franklin

Writing Out of Annihilation

In the Warsaw Ghetto, the journalist Rokhl Auerbach risked her life to capture the stories of the Jewish community and, by writing about the people she knew, memorialized an entire lost world.

September 19, 2024 issue

Yuri Slezkine

A Sacred Scripture of Doubt

A new book by Gary Saul Morson tells how Russian realist fiction foretold, frustrated, and outlived the Bolshevik quest for certainty.

July 18, 2024 issue

The Latest

Natasha Wimmer

Rigorous Innocence

A new volume of essays and crónicas by the Argentine writer Hebe Uhart is often funny and sad in equal measure, as the stories follow her travels from Buenos Aires to Guadalajara.

April 10, 2025 issue

Dan Rockmore

The Quantum Chaos of Literature

Benjamín Labatut’s writing—dizzying, unnerving, and packed with ideas about science and mathematics—blurs the line between truth and imagination.

April 10, 2025 issue

Michael Hofmann

Curable or Not?

The late Swiss writer Markus Werner’s bleakly funny The Frog in the Throat, first published forty years ago, is a parallel portrait of father-and-son misanthropes and seems to speak directly to our moment.

February 27, 2025 issue

Julia Kornberg

The Basement Tapes

At the end of his life, Reinaldo Arenas dictated his posthumously published memoir into a recorder. The newly unearthed tapes reveal a writer working beyond his mythology.

September 21, 2024

Natasha Wimmer

The Watercolorist

The short fiction of Ángel Bonomini possesses a lightness that sets him apart from contemporaries like Borges and Cortázar.

July 18, 2024 issue

Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Emma Ramadan

Forever Elsewhere

In keeping with the inalienable rights of the Storyteller, allow me to invent a different fall from grace.

June 19, 2024

Larry Rohter

In the Heart of Bahia

Itamar Vieira Junior’s first novel, Crooked Plow, tells a story of suffering, resistance, revenge, and redemption set in the impoverished, arid Brazilian Northeast.

June 6, 2024 issue

Catherine Lacey

The Woman in the Well

In Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes, a dissatisfied Italian everywoman starts keeping a diary, and eventually her own thoughts become too much to bear.

May 23, 2024 issue

Anahid Nersessian

Wanting for Nothing

Constance Debré’s novels, whose sensibility is minimalist and at times even desolate, reject the expectations of personal growth that animate much feminist literature.

May 9, 2024 issue

Ariel Dorfman

Clamoring for Life

Though exceptional, fully developed female characters abound in Gabriel García Márquez’s work, only in his last novel, Until August, is a woman the uncontested protagonist on her own journey of self-discovery.

May 9, 2024 issue