Nathaniel Rich

Writing Like a Mountain

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

Silent Spring

Why aren’t the candidates talking about climate change?

Ufologists, Unite!

Belief in UFOs sits uneasily between science and theology.

Writing Under Fire

In Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II, James Heffernan argues that for a full understanding of any historical period, we must read the literature written while its events were still unfolding.

Houses of Holes

Hiroko Oyamada’s novels inhabit the borderlands between fantasy and reality, an uncanny landscape played for horror and comedy.

‘The Italian Proust’

Italo Svevo’s late fiction has all the dark irony, self-flagellating introspection, manic obsessiveness, and unapologetic moral perversity of his best-known work. 

The Monsters in Cabinet 13

Un-su Kim’s novels take on the capricious drudgery of modern professional life and the crazed whimsy and sociopathic violence it can inspire.

Exhilarating Antihumanism

Joy Williams’s Harrow, a screwball fantasia of environmental collapse, is mercilessly contemptuous of the pieties of our age.

Emissary from a Watery Future

“Writers can’t do a lot about climate change. But writers can help us puzzle through what climate change is doing to us.”

Rolling Along

The beauty, eccentricity, and precariousness of life on the river side of the New Orleans levees.

George R. Stewart’s Perfect ‘Storm’

By turning a force of nature into his chief protagonist, the novelist created a foundational text of eco-fiction that has only gained in power eight decades later.

American Humbug

“It is very amusing,” P.T. Barnum said, to see how easily people “deceive themselves by being too incredulous.”

Pandemic Journal, April 6–12

Brief dispatches by New York Review writers documenting the coronavirus outbreak around the world, including Verlyn Klinkenborg in East Chatham, Hugh Eakin in Minneapolis–St. Paul, Dalia Hatuqa in Amman, and more.

Swiveling Man

Downhill Racing

Philip Roth (1933–2018)

Though two generations separated us, I felt that he spoke directly to me or, in some mystical, incoherent sense, spoke from somewhere inside my brain.

Roth Agonistes

Philip Roth’s ‘Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013’

Rushdie’s New York Bubble

Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Golden House’

On Robert Silvers

Nineteen writers remember The New York Review’s editor.

Southern Despair

A defense of rural America