Section
Literary Fiction
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The Golden Age of TV
“Danielewski, it seems, is not acting as a writer here, but as a hoarder of phrases, the more redolent of a vanished “Western” mode of living, the better.”
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The Allure of Postcolonial Pathos
“To what extent might the Booker—and venues like it in Europe and the US—be drawn for self-serving reasons to fiction like Kiran Desai’s?”
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“Melodrama with a Modern Sensibility”: A Conversation with Megan Cummins
How do the families and friends of those struggling with addiction perceive that addiction, cope with it, and try (or fail) to love that person anyway?
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“These Cycles Are Repeating Themselves”: Lara Norgaard on Indonesian History and Translating Political Fiction
“Even characters with completely benign intentions or mildly selfish intentions end up doing pretty bad things because of the institutional structures around them.”
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Rash Reading, Slow Watching with Virginia Woolf and Chantal Akerman
In the hands of this writer and this filmmaker, “the mother” is someone with whom to have a lifelong conversation, a contested perspective through which to read the world.
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Douglas Stuart and the Struggle to Endure
“Although Cal’s Scotland looks a lot different than Shuggie’s or Mungo’s, his story continues the theme of the first two novels, expanding the hardly fictionalized economic and cultural decimation of Margaret Thatcher’s primacy from the urban to the rural.”
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The Novel as Instrument: Sinan Antoon and Michael Allan
Our partner podcast Novel Dialogue invites a novelist and a literary critic to talk about novels from every angle: how we read them, write them, publish them, and remember them. This season’s signature question is: Who was your favorite teacher and why? “I am haunted by history: the history of dictatorship, the history of empire,…
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Xochitl Gonzalez on “Last Night in Brooklyn”
“The last few years in the marketplace have proven that there is a really rabid Latino readership out there for lots of kinds of books. And it’s very exciting.”
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Place presents itself to you in fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson
“The notion of the quintessential Johannesburg book might be quite a cheeky one. There are so many Johannesburgs.”
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Barometric Reading: Solvej Balle and the New Atmospheric Novel
“Despite what Knausgaard says about the novel’s fixation on time, On the Calculation of Volume is very much about volume: about the sounds, objects, and textures that fills the space of its pages.”
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Beautiful Sentences Matter: Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley
“Queer theory in general spoke to me in an embodied way, beyond its important theoretical work, because it revealed for me that beautiful sentences matter and that they can be critical aspects of the reading experience.”
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“Disaster Has Happened and Is Happening”: Tara Menon on What the Novel Reveals
“I wanted to propose grief as perhaps the most appropriate response we can have to what is happening to the natural world—the disappearance of coral reefs in the Andaman Sea and bird habitats in New York.”
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Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions: Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann
“I come to the understanding I know nothing, and then I completely throw myself into the research.”
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Is the Cis Literary World Okay?
Contemporary trans literature is thriving in a highly freewheeling manner… How revealing, then, that David Brooks recently suggested that literary fiction has been declining in quality.
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Deracialized Discos: On “Discomania” and “The Pepsi-Cola Addict”
It’s common for teenage fantasy to find an engine in fiction. But teenage fantasy runs out.
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The Empty Lab, in Science and in Fiction
When literature refuses readers entry into the laboratory, it fosters suspicions of science itself.
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Can Literary Fiction Save Classical Music?
Classical music’s most troubling traditions include erasing Black performers, abusing and harassing in conservatories, and refusing to acknowledge physical injuries.
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What Future for Native Sovereignty?
What does it mean to seek shelter on stolen land? asks Jon Hickey’s new novel, Big Chief.
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The Past as a Site of Radical Otherness in Nishant Batsha’s “A Bomb Placed Close to the Heart”
“I am a novelist first and a historian second. That’s how the tension you mention resolves itself: I know I’m trying to tell a story.”
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“Conjuring and Reality”: An Interview with Jeanne Thornton
“Pronouncing a sentence about a person, wrapping them up in your narrative, can be a very gracious action, or a cruel one, or probably most often both.”
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“Weird, but Fantastic”: Devoney Looser on Those Who Love Jane Austen
“The Austen biography space is fairly saturated and covered. But there’s still a lot more we can learn by seeing her in context: that is, by seeing Austen in relation to her society, her family, her friends.”
