Literature

Fiction

Proust’s Jewish Question

The debate over Proust’s relation to his Jewish identity ultimately turns not just on his personal attachments but on how he represents Jewish characters in his novel.

June 26, 2025 issue

Ursula Lindsey

Mohamed Choukri’s Unromantic Tangier

The Moroccan writer’s works are a bracing corrective to the myth of his city as a glamorous, bohemian playground.

June 26, 2025 issue

Susan Neiman

The Conformist

Daniel Kehlmann’s latest novel, The Director, documents the little compromises that led G. W. Pabst, like millions of other people, to accept fascism.

June 12, 2025 issue

Lisa Halliday

A More Perfect Truth

Claire Messud’s exhilarating new novel spans four generations of a French Algerian family reckoning with their place as failed colonists.

May 15, 2025 issue

Chris Ware

Pure Thought on Paper

Olivier Schrauwen’s graphic novel Sunday is, like Ulysses, an attempt to capture the thoughts, experiences, memories, musings, and mania of one man over a single day. It is also, like Ulysses, a masterpiece.

May 29, 2025 issue

Jesse McCarthy

Return to My Native Land

Vincent O. Carter’s forgotten novel Such Sweet Thunder is a modernist masterpiece and a tribute to a lost black world of Kansas City.

April 24, 2025 issue

Andrew Delbanco

The Connoisseur of Desire

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great theme of erotic anticipation is never more alive than in the longings of Jay Gatsby.

May 29, 2025 issue

Michael Hofmann

Novels Without Food

How did a writer as unconventional as Andrey Platonov manage to write so many irresistibly interesting books?

June 12, 2025 issue

Fiction & Poetry

Colm Tóibín

‘Her Own Woman’

In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy created herself on the page—and then reimagined the self she had established.

March 13, 2025

Langdon Hammer

Grandfather’s Bible

In the world of her grandparents in rural Nova Scotia, Elizabeth Bishop found a deep well of inspiration—and Christian beliefs she would always struggle against.

February 23, 2025

Merve Emre

Something in the Dark

Djuna Barnes’s short stories return again and again to characters suffering from love, fear, and alienation.

October 5, 2024

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

The Latest

Namwali Serpell

Keeping Up with Mrs. Jones

Nettie Jones’s debut novel, published in 1984 and newly reissued, is still breathtaking and shockingly bawdy.

June 12, 2025 issue

Nathaniel Rich

Writing Like a Mountain

In the novels of the Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, people become ants and mountains become menacing gods.

May 15, 2025 issue

Laura Marsh

Shared Delusions

Katie Kitamura’s latest novel prizes open the question of what a family is and what pretenses sustain it.

April 24, 2025 issue

Thomas Powers

A Mighty Theme

Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is “the Moby-Dick of the plains”—the great book about the American West.

April 24, 2025 issue

Merve Emre

An Unsentimental Education

Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons summons the romantic vision of the university as an unblighted Eden to mock it through the downfall of one of its deceived mortals.

April 24, 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 Dirda

The Chronicler of Unhappiness

Ford Madox Ford’s sensuous, vital novels often drew on the events of his rich and muddled life.

March 27, 2025 issue

James Walton

Centrist Dads Unreformed

The vast social world of Andrew O’Hagan’s new novel is designed to pose a challenge to good liberal values.

March 13, 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

Alma Guillermoprieto

A Telenovela Macondo

Netflix’s adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude has skimmed off only the melodramatic and the anecdotal parts of Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece.

February 27, 2025 issue