Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

“Scribbling”: A Story

“She ordered a coffee and a box of twelve doughnuts in the interest of research. The place was really rather good for scribbling. It was awfully nice, actually, not having to worry.”

July 18, 2024 issue

Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated by Lara Vergnaud

“Ami Police”: A Story

“An impressive row of necklaces dangled from her neck, and in terror I noticed, shining like diamonds, roughly sewn onto tiny lockets along each chain, dozens of small eyes crowned with minuscule mirror shards.”

July 18, 2024 issue

Francine Prose

More Than Just Acknowledgments

Tommy Orange’s novels document the shifting balance between the blessings and curses of modern Native life, most of which have been in operation since long before the characters were born.

July 18, 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

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

Anne Enright

The High Irish Style

John McGahern sought formality and distance in his prose, but his masterful novels were always underpinned by the difficult realities of his own life.

July 18, 2024 issue

Michael Gorra

A Story of His Own

Percival Everett’s James retells The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, showing a world hidden from Mark Twain’s white characters.

July 18, 2024 issue

Tim Parks

Reading Against the Novel

In hundreds of essays and reviews, the nineteenth-century lawyer and judge James Fitzjames Stephen considered the novel’s effects on society at a time when it was becoming the dominant form of entertainment.

July 18, 2024 issue

Milan Kundera (1929–2023)

Milan Kundera

The Czech Wager

January 22, 1981 issue

Milan Kundera

The Tragedy of Central Europe

April 26, 1984 issue

Milan Kundera

The Novel and Europe

July 19, 1984 issue

Milan Kundera

‘Man Thinks, God Laughs’

June 13, 1985 issue

Milan Kundera

The Umbrella, the Night World, and the Lonely Moon

December 19, 1991 issue

Milan Kundera

You’re Not in Your Own House Here, My Dear Fellow

September 21, 1995 issue

Alston Anderson’s Tradition

Darryl Pinckney

In Sorrow’s Kitchen

“Hurston exhibited a strong inclination toward the iconoclastic, but the shifts in her opinions and the elusiveness of her personality sometimes make it hard to see her for what she was, a black woman ahead of her historical moment.”

December 21, 1978 issue

Ralph Ellison

The Blues

“The tremendous burden of sociology which LeRoi Jones would place upon this body of music is enough to give even the blues the blues.”

February 6, 1964 issue

Thomas R. Edwards

Ghost Story

“Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure of our national literature. She has written a work that brings to the darkest corners of American experience the wisdom, and the courage, to know them as they are.”

November 5, 1987 issue

Christopher Benfey

The Haiku of Confinement

“Wright feverishly wrote some 4,000 haiku, from which he selected 817 as worthy of publication. Julia Wright chose one of the poems, a metaphorical self-portrait, as Wright’s epitaph: ‘Burning out its time, / And timing its own burning, / One lonely candle.’”

June 25, 2020

The Latest

Rachel Eisendrath

A Portrait on the Wall

It had not really occurred to me until many years after her death that my grandmother could be considered representative of a whole culture.

July 14, 2024

Anna Leszkiewicz

‘The Small Girl’s Proust’

Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle tends to be read as a romance novel. But beneath its surface charm is a metaliterary inquiry into form, style, and merit.

July 13, 2024

Elizabeth Willis

The Perils of Pauline (1914)

a poem

July 18, 2024 issue

Edward Salem

X Days Since the Genocide Began

a poem

July 18, 2024 issue