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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The Empty Lab, in Science and in Fiction
When literature refuses readers entry into the laboratory, it fosters suspicions of science itself.
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Can Literary Fiction Save Classical Music?
Classical music’s most troubling traditions include erasing Black performers, abusing and harassing in conservatories, and refusing to acknowledge physical injuries.
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What Future for Native Sovereignty?
What does it mean to seek shelter on stolen land? asks Jon Hickey’s new novel, Big Chief.
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The Past as a Site of Radical Otherness in Nishant Batsha’s “A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart”
“I am a novelist first and a historian second. That’s how the tension you mention resolves itself: I know I’m trying to tell a story.”
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“Conjuring and Reality”: An Interview with Jeanne Thornton
“Pronouncing a sentence about a person, wrapping them up in your narrative, can be a very gracious action, or a cruel one, or probably most often both.”
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“Weird, but Fantastic”: Devoney Looser on Those Who Love Jane Austen
“The Austen biography space is fairly saturated and covered. But there’s still a lot more we can learn by seeing her in context: that is, by seeing Austen in relation to her society, her family, her friends.”
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Mute Compulsion
The trauma plot and the slut-shaming dossier are actually parallel formations, reveals “The Guest.”
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J. M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” @ 25: A Roundtable
What freshly nuanced perspectives might we bring to the violent late 20th-century history Coetzee describes?
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“Can the Dead Save the Living?”: Reading Han Kang During South Korea’s Martial Law Crisis
Can literature, by preserving past trauma, stop history from repeating itself?
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The Scenery of the Crime
Opera demands a generous sense of the preposterous. So too does the mystery novel.
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Time Interpolated
Disruptive and restorative, interpolation is the paradoxical form of life, literature, and time itself.
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After the Deluge: What Future for Climate Fiction?
Even in a world remade, the past defines the present.
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We Better Laugh About It: Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí
Our partner podcast Novel Dialogue invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season’s signature question is: If you could spend a year anywhere, where, when, and how would you spend it? Álvaro Enrigue and critic Maia Gil’Adí…
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Chekhov’s Pandemic?
Even as Chekhov brings gloom befitting the pandemic to “Tom Lake” and “Our Country Friends,” these novels are irradiated by the theater.
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Who Owns These Tools?: Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde
“The desire for that sort of purist kind of connection that one might call communion, is something that I’m interested in in all of my work.”
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“That In Between Time”: Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary
“I always feel that when I write, it’s like weaving senses.”
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“Foolishness on the Page”: Talking with Zahid Rafiq
“What ends up in the writing is what the characters see, and what they see is determined by how they feel.”
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Aria Aber’s Defiant Love Letter to Berlin
“The experiences of coming of age and coming into art—of finding your own voice and a vision for your craft—are spiritual and psychological journeys, and, for lack of a better word, universal.”
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Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
Our partner podcast Novel Dialogue invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season’s signature question is: If you could spend a year anywhere, where, when, and how would you spend it? In Season 9, Novel Dialogue set…
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Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew Pepper
“I guess my actual process is probably despair and cortisol.”
