Literature

In Translation

Kwame Anthony Appiah

Translation’s Drift

Two books look closely at both the limitations and the possibilities of the art of literary translation.

June 26, 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

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

Madeleine Thien

Killing Memories

The Chinese writer Fang Fang’s novel Soft Burial probes traumatic national memories across several generations, even as her Covid diary in 2020 made her the target of a relentless disinformation campaign in China.

May 15, 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

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

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

Anna Della Subin

‘Her Own Cuneiform’

The poet Dunya Mikhail is preoccupied with Iraq’s urgent present, but she studies it with the care of an archaeologist exhuming relics of the deep past.

May 29, 2025 issue

Edmund White (1940–2025)

Remembering Edmund White

A selection of Edmund White’s contributions to the New York Review. Read all of his essays here.

Edmund White

A Hungry Little Boy

January 12, 2012 issue

Edmund White

Forster in Love: The Story

November 6, 2014 issue

Edmund White

I Do, I Do

August 14, 2014 issue

Edmund White

Is There a Good Way to Be Gay?

October 25, 2012 issue

Edmund White

Nabokov’s Passion

March 29, 1984 issue

Edmund White

Ecstatic Truth

June 28, 2018 issue

Edmund White

The House of Edith

April 26, 2007 issue

Edmund White

The High Wire of Jean Cocteau

November 24, 2016 issue

Edmund White

Proust the Passionate Reader

April 4, 2013 issue

The Latest

Natasha Wimmer

Rigorous Innocence

A new volume of essays and crónicas by the Argentine writer Hebe Uhart is often funny and sad in equal measure, as the stories follow her travels from Buenos Aires to Guadalajara.

April 10, 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

Robyn Creswell

Bewildered Rhapsodies

The difficult history of translating a miraculous text

February 13, 2025 issue

Deborah Eisenberg

Urgent Messages from Eternity

An exhibition of Franz Kafka’s postcards, letters, and manuscript pages rekindles our sense of him as a writer deeply connected to his own time and place.

February 13, 2025 issue

Peter Brooks

Passion’s Countervoices

Balzac’s The Lily in the Valley gives full-throated voice to romantic passion and at the same time contains it, inflating its rhetoric while ironizing it.

January 16, 2025 issue

Zadie Smith

The Dream of the Raised Arm

In early Thirties Germany, as the Nazi threat grew, the state’s propaganda machine began to penetrate the dream life of its citizenry. What of our dreams today, under the influence of the algorithms? And what will come with the return of Donald Trump?

December 5, 2024 issue

Christine Smallwood

As I Lay Dying

Across thousands of pages, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Morning Star series presents a relentless excess of its characters’ inner lives; at its best, it poses troubling questions about the scope of human knowledge.

November 7, 2024 issue

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

Alice Kaplan

The Posthumous Autobiographer

Michel Leiris’s literary memoirs belong to a form almost unrecognizable today; they are driven not by plot—the narrative arc—but by words.

October 3, 2024 issue

Ruth Franklin

Writing Out of Annihilation

In the Warsaw Ghetto, the journalist Rokhl Auerbach risked her life to capture the stories of the Jewish community and, by writing about the people she knew, memorialized an entire lost world.

September 19, 2024 issue