Peter C. Baker Staying Alive Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall is a gripping drama of survival that plays with the conventions of the “last man” genre. April 18, 2024 issue
Sigrid Nunez ‘An Archaic Country,’ Dark and Bright A new collection of stories by the novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya celebrates the women of Russia, countering the frequent bleakness and tragedy of their lives with tenderness and optimism. March 21, 2024 issue
Frances Wilson Across the Moominverse Small books bearing great burdens, the Moomins contain the whole arsenal of Western literature. January 18, 2024 issue
Katie Trumpener A Eulogy of Failed Remembrance Alexander Kluge’s account of the Allied air raid on his hometown in Germany, while suffering memory lapses of its own, examines the city’s amnesia as a defense against terror. January 18, 2024 issue
Colm Tóibín In the Streets of Barcelona In Antagony, the Spanish writer Luis Goytisolo attempts to imagine a new sort of novel in which the streets have the force of character and urban topography has its own destiny. December 21, 2023 issue
Joshua Cohen The Imps of His Age In a harrowing, witty novel by Miroslav Krleža, written in Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II, a mediocre lawyer succumbs to the impetus to speak against all reason. June 6, 2023
Christine Smallwood Poor Torvey! A new production of A Doll’s House starring Jessica Chastain emphasizes that everyone in Ibsen’s play suffers under the binding ties of patriarchy. April 6, 2023
Sophie Pinkham Invasion, Day by Day Yevgenia Belorusets’s War Diary is rigorous in its focus on the interior life, asking what it means to be at home during a war. December 7, 2023 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
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
Scholastique Mukasonga 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
Lily Meyer Nefer’s Mission Sara Gallardo’s 1958 novel January, about a young woman’s quest for an abortion, became a touchstone in Argentine feminists’ twenty-first-century fight for the right to choose. March 21, 2024 issue
Peter Brooks In Search of His Vocation The best description of In Search of Lost Time may come from what Proust calls dreams in its opening pages: “a formidable game with time.” March 21, 2024 issue
Natasha Wimmer Scrupulous Extravagance The Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist Alejo Carpentier depicted revolution’s promise as well as its folly. February 22, 2024 issue