A resource for reading about, teaching, and discussing the novel as an artistic and cultural form.
Nicholas Dames
Nicholas Dames is Theodore Kahan Professor of Humanities in the department of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. His most recent book is The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2007). His current project is a history of the chapter from late antiquity to the modern novel. He has written on contemporary fiction, novel reading, and the humanities for The Atlantic, n+1, The Nation, New Left Review, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Book Review. 
Millennials in Beattieland
No word haunts discussions of Ann Beattie like the word generation. Once upon a time, back when novelists still had the luxury of holding their publicity at a ...
We All Must Play “The Westing Game”
In the beginning was Sunset Towers. By which I mean, at the beginning of what I quickly came to think of as my reading life: whatever came before, whether read ...
The Email Master
By all accounts, Nell Zink writes fantastic emails. The story of how she brazenly initiated a correspondence with Jonathan Franzen, convincing him over time to act as her agent and promoter, is now a ...
“The People v. O. J. Simpson” as Historical Fiction
The location is wrong. The white Bronco is clearly weaving through traffic on the 710 South as it approaches its intersection with the 10, on the eastern border of El Sereno, just by the Cal State LA ...
Franzen Makes Nice
Reading Jonathan Franzen’s fifth novel, Purity, in a state at once sympathetic and skeptical, I kept thinking of George Kaplan. In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest, a ring of foreign ...
Knausgaard’s Novel Degree Zero
Proustian epiphanies happen all the time, particularly to children, and they don’t necessarily add up to much.
Story Time
For a few weeks at the start of 2013, George Saunders was the gently puzzled face of American letters. You could see him being interviewed by Stephen Colbert, Charlie Rose, or George Stephanopoulos ...
Edward St. Aubyn and the Depressive Third Person
Few recent novelists offer as many misguided reasons for being liked or disliked than Edward St. Aubyn, whose five Patrick Melrose novels—Never Mind (1992), Bad News (1992), Some Hope (1994) ...