Section
Literary Fiction
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Beautiful Sentences Matter: Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley
“Queer theory in general spoke to me in an embodied way, beyond its important theoretical work, because it revealed for me that beautiful sentences matter and that they can be critical aspects of the reading experience.”
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Why Nixon Is Tricky for Novelists
We have Nixon to kick around again. During the election and then early presidency of Donald Trump …
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Rachel Cusk’s Disappearing Act
In 2001, after a decade or so as the author of well-regarded, modest-prize-winning fiction, Rachel Cusk began to develop into a kind of memoirist provocateur …
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Elif Batuman’s Apprenticeship
MFA fiction programs may have no fiercer critic than Elif Batuman. She has mocked the writing workshop multiple times in print and mourned the kind of prose it …
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Singing in the Dark
They came to bury her with praises but, defeated once again by her sheer presence, their words shriveled and rotted in the monsoon damp. As Mahasweta Devi’s dead body lay in a Kolkata hospital on July 28, 2016, Indian politicians—many of whom Devi had fought throughout her life with great courage—queued up to make a…
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Caliban Blues
Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed is one of hundreds of rewritings of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. The adaptations began just over a decade after its first performance, in 1611, and for the past four …
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George Eliot, the Radical
Readers unfamiliar with the life story of Victorian novelist George Eliot might find Dinitia Smith’s historical novel The Honeymoon startling. Did the author of Middlemarch, born in 1819 to a land …
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The Monstrous H. P. Lovecraft
Part literary detective story, part Gothic tale, and part fictional biography, Paul La Farge’s enthralling novel The Night Ocean is composed of the formal hybrids and …
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Politics and Play in Spain Today
Juan José Millás’s Desde la sombra (From the Shadow) is a short novel, not yet translated into English, about alienation, loneliness, voyeurism, and the power of …
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That Was Now
When Ali Smith’s Autumn was released in the UK this past October, it was greeted as the first “serious” Brexit novel. Yet its ostensible subject is the friendship between an old man and a young …
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The Fiction of Bohemian NYC
What does New York City have to do with America as a whole? This metropolis, which gave rise to the nation’s current leader and whose worst gilded …
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Free Is and Free Ain’t
Are novelists who write about slavery reminding us of its ongoing effects, or using the past to illuminate problems specific to the present? Are they arguing that slavery never stopped shaping African American lives in the United States, or helping us to imagine new grounds for African American feelings of national belonging? In the weeks…
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The Yurt of Fiction
This summer, George Saunders wrote that Donald Trump had given him a gift. Saunders had been traveling across the country, attending Trump rallies …
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The South African Novel Today
Who is South Africa’s leading English novelist? Who has succeeded Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer, and J. M. Coetzee—still with us, but hardly a South African novelist any longer? Since the arrival of democracy …
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Miéville’s Surreal Weapons
In his rambling 2011 photo-essay “London’s Overthrow,” composed in the lead-up to the London Olympics, China Miéville takes his reader through the ever-changing, history-drenched streets of his beloved city …
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Feeling like the Internet
What has the advent of the internet meant for the novel? Apart, that is, from its having opened a gaping time-sucking sinkhole at the center of culture? The sweet drip-feed of sentiment and savagery downloading to our devices is absorbing attention that might otherwise have been poured into books, but the effects of the internet on…
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Marlon James’s Savage Business
The irony in the title of Marlon James’s new novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, is twofold. For one, this 686-page book is far from brief. On the contrary, it is a raucous, nearly …
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Falling Faintly: McEwan’s Latest
In 1893, the Scottish writer William Sharp began publishing poetry under the pseudonym Fiona MacLeod. MacLeod’s poems caught the eye of W. B. Yeats, who admired her lyricism even as he disdained the verse Sharp published under his own name. The elements of this minor literary intrigue—modern poetry and sexual confusion—lie behind Ian McEwan’s equally…
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Conversion Sickness
“Nathaniel P. is George Eliot. Nathaniel P. is Tolstoy.” Thus proclaimed a friend of mine in adulation of young novelist Adelle Waldman’s widely acclaimed debut, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Waldman’s Nate Piven is a writer in the New York of the very recent past, after the city’s center of literary gravity slid across the…
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How Angry Is She?
In April of this year, an interviewer asked Claire Messud a silly question about Nora Eldridge, the complex and prickly protagonist of Messud’s new novel The Woman Upstairs: would Messud want to be friends with her?1 Messud’s exasperated answer—“For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that?”—was interpreted by some readers as evidence that the…
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The Euphoria of Influence: Jeffrey Eugenides’s “The Marriage Plot”
In The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides asks what would happen if nineteenth-century literature married twentieth-century theory, and the result is many brilliant novels in one: a romance, a coming-of-age story, a travelogue, an account of madness, and a tale of religious quest. Its protagonists are Brown University students, Class of 1982, which also makes The…
