Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

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

Fintan O’Toole

Playing for Time

With the boisterous energy of direct speech, the novelist Ferdia Lennon takes on both the playfulness and the harsh realism of Euripides.

November 7, 2024 issue

Nicole Rudick

‘A Woman Who Wins’

In her series of historical novels about the life of Saint Hilda of Whitby, Nicola Griffith explores how a woman of modest means became one of the most influential people in seventh-century Britain.

November 7, 2024 issue

Julius Taranto

The Father-Daughter Dance

Jo Hamya’s The Hypocrite is fundamentally a social novel, revolving around debates that occupy the public sphere: gender and generational dynamics, as well as the ethical problems with using family as grist for the artistic mill.

October 17, 2024 issue

Anahid Nersessian

Speaking the Unspeakable

The Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah asks what it would mean—aesthetically, morally, politically—to write a good poem about genocide.

October 17, 2024 issue

Clare Bucknell

The Fact Man

At the heart of Daniel Defoe’s fictional world is a feeling for change, of the mutability and shiftiness of modern life and the people who thrive in it.

October 17, 2024 issue

Hannah Gold

‘Deviations and Catastrophes’

The characters in Kathleen Alcott’s stories struggle with whether to let their attachment to the past derail them in the present.

October 17, 2024 issue

Christopher Tayler

‘The Death of Some Ideal’

The Irish novelist Anne Enright writes with great prowess and wit about women who make a virtue of getting on with things.

October 17, 2024 issue

John le Carré (1931–2020)

Christian Caryl

Back from the Cold

November 23, 2017 issue

Neal Ascherson

Which John le Carré?

October 13, 2016 issue

Jon O. Newman

The Deadly Art of Double Deception

May 7, 2015 issue

William Finnegan

Double-Cross in the Congo

April 12, 2007 issue

Hilary Mantel

The Devil’s Playground

July 19, 2001 issue

Diane Johnson

Missionary

May 20, 1999 issue

Milan Kundera (1929–2023)

Milan Kundera

The Czech Wager

January 22, 1981 issue

Milan Kundera

The Tragedy of Central Europe

April 26, 1984 issue

Milan Kundera

The Novel and Europe

July 19, 1984 issue

Milan Kundera

‘Man Thinks, God Laughs’

June 13, 1985 issue

Milan Kundera

The Umbrella, the Night World, and the Lonely Moon

December 19, 1991 issue

Milan Kundera

You’re Not in Your Own House Here, My Dear Fellow

September 21, 1995 issue

The Latest

Regina Marler

The Cuttlefish’s Play

Richard Powers’s Playground does for oceans what his 2018 novel The Overstory did for trees: it implores us to open ourselves to the ingenuity of life beyond the human.

December 19, 2024 issue

Karen Solie

The Barrens

a poem

December 19, 2024 issue

Ange Mlinko

The Shoals of Prose

Recent books of prose by two of our best poets suggest the importance of criticism to the development of a poet’s work.

December 19, 2024 issue

Alexander Leggatt

You Only Live Twice

Shakespeare’s characters often navigate the dangerous possibility of a second chance.

December 19, 2024 issue

Joanna Biggs

A Very Quiet Symphony

Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test seems to be about a temporary loss of hearing but is actually one woman’s rehearsal for the losses that come, unbidden, for us all.

December 19, 2024 issue

Ishion Hutchinson

Snow Elegy

a poem

December 19, 2024 issue