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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Knausgaard’s Ruthless Freedom
So here it is at last: the end of Knausgaard’s struggle. It is 1,160 pages long, divided into three parts. Part 2 consists of a long essay on Hitler. Both …
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The Great Global Grad School Novel
Was Sharmila Sen “happy” on the first morning she woke up in the United States to the strange smell of bacon frying? That’s what her young son wants to …
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We Are All King Lear’s Children
Which is Shakespeare’s timeliest play—the one that best mirrors our present moment? This is a perennial question, and perhaps a silly one, but we might begin an answer …
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Who Is Sick and Who Is Well?
I might be tempted to describe Terese Mailhot’s new memoir, Heart Berries, as “raw,” had she not warned against it. “The danger politically or artistically is that …
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“The Girl I Loved Was in a Cult”
North Korean refugees, among other refugees, have been sharing their stories of high-stakes escapes. American university students, among other women, have …
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Birth of a Mother
What exactly is motherhood? I’ve been mulling it over the past few months, during which time I again experienced pregnancy and childbirth, and again dealt with the confusion and sleep deprivation that attend the motherhood of early infancy. I agreed to write something for Public Books during my last trimester, a period that, this time,…
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Muses Explain Things to Me
The feminist muse is an artist, too. No silent sitter, she swaps the easel-facing chaise for a work space wholly hers, sloughing off the obligation to inspire …
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Helen DeWitt, Hand to Mouth
Is Helen DeWitt a genius? Readers familiar with the author’s fiction will not find this question out of line. Genius is a word that comes quickly to the lips of …
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Purgatory Is for Real
If heaven, as the Talking Heads lyric puts it, is a place where nothing ever happens, it has nevertheless powered numerous books up American best-seller lists. In the past decade, several titles have offered eyewitness testimony from people back from the bourne from which supposedly no traveler returns, including Heaven Is for Real (2010), in…
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Ondaatje’s Long War
In a scathing review of The English Patient, Hilary Mantel called Michael Ondaatje’s most feted work “uneven, unresolved, unsatisfactory.” Her criticism has since become a regular complaint about the …
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Brexit or Utopia?
Ali Smith’s Autumn, the first installment of a four-volume “seasonal quartet” that now continues with Winter, was hailed on its release as “the first great Brexit novel.” As any reader of the book knows, there …
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Louise Erdrich’s Future Faith
Between nuclear-button-measuring contests that have our collective doomsday clocks perpetually set to midnight and legislative coups d’état that have …
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Hollinghurst’s Nighttime Travels
With The Sparsholt Affair, Alan Hollinghurst has established himself as the master of ellipsis, that conceit of novelistic form that leaves a period of time …
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Nurturing the Margins
“Wherever you are, I hope you are safe and know I loved you enough to write you this book,” Catherine Hernandez writes in the opening pages of her debut novel, Scarborough. While the dedication …
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Down Under, Between Destinations
In 1966, Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey published The Tyranny of Distance, a work that described how Australia’s history had been shaped by …
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Walking the Beat in Segregated Atlanta
After more than a year riding along with Philadelphia policemen, getting to know their beats and routes through the City of Brotherly Love, Jonathan Rubinstein …
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The Sisters Grimm
Can a centuries-old literary tradition tell us anything useful about modern life? The continuing vitality of the fairy tale in contemporary culture would suggest an emphatic yes. And the vast portfolio of fairy tales revised and reimagined by feminist writers highlights the genre’s particular relevance to ongoing questions about gender, difference, and power. Carmen Maria…
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What Is at Stake in Yemen?
As a commodity in the United States, coffee has gone through three waves. In the early 20th century, with the advent of mass production and vacuum packaging …
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The Misfit Resistance
What is a misfit? In Lidia Yuknavitch’s definition, the term refers to those of us who “do life weird or wrong,” who literally miss fitting in with normative models of linear progress. Childhood trauma is often the connective tissue between misfit experiences: poverty, abuse, racism, violence, and war are all familiar elements in misfit life…
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Motherhood in the End Times
Having a child forces you to confront all of those abstract threats you might have previously labored to ignore: physical entropy, the planetary future, human …
