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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Love in a Broken World
There are now, it seems, more ways than ever for a woman to reach or ruin her own potential. Mainstream feminism today hinges upon a vision of woman as rational actor capable of logically and authoritatively plotting her own course through life. Of course, it’s not that simple: women run up against intractable barriers, broadly…
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Immigration’s Daughters
The voices of the six Chinese American girls who narrate the short stories in Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart collectively convey the emotional texture—and often the burden—of striving. What does it mean to believe that life can and will improve? …
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Claire Messud’s Noble Lie
In the bouquet of novel typologies—the picaresque, the Künstlerroman, the Zeitroman, the novel of ideas, magical realism, hysterical realism, “experimental” anything—the bildungsroman is the least …
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Our Migrant World
Within the rhetorical toolbox of contemporary political discourse, the language used to characterize international migration, refugee crises, and border crossings might fairly be called impoverished. “Waves” of refugees are “flooding” the West, which is “overwhelmed” by the “swamp” of new arrivals; or, to swap a logic of inundation for one of infestation, migrants “swarm” their…
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Live Theory: An Interview with Tom McCarthy
“It might just be that the final measure of a writer is not so much what they achieve themselves as what they render possible for others.” This is the final sentence of …
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Great Aspirations
Chetan Bhagat is possibly the most successful Indian English novelist ever, having sold over seven million copies of his books over a relatively short career. But he is largely unheard of in the West, part of a trend in Indian publishing that has seen the rise of numerous popular authors writing in English who make…
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The Indispensable Anger of Arundhati Roy
Angry novels are divisive. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy’s hyperanticipated and indignant return to fiction, has accordingly delighted and …
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Cursed Masculinity
Masculinity is a curse. This, at least, is the driving conceit behind Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Ugandan epic, Kintu, published in Kenya by the Kwani Trust in 2014, and in the US by Transit Books …
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Forms of Taboo, Forms of Love
Sonya Chung’s new novel, The Loved Ones, is in constant danger of being about just one thing, even though it’s richly and intelligently about how that one thing is …
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Future Shocks
“The future’s not what it used to be,” sings Mickey Newbury in his 1971 hit of the same name. His song frames this witticism in romantically personal terms, but the insight has broad applicability, even if Newbury’s lyrics no longer appeal. According to the historian Reinhart Koselleck, “the future” became a topic for serious thought…
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Who Owns the Blues?
Long ago, in a time available to us in the dirty crackle and hiss of 78s with worn labels, an African American singer who had traveled for 15 years on the medicine show circuit committed to shellac a song called “Old Dog Blue.” His name was Jim Jackson. Jackson recorded “Old Dog Blue” for Vocalion…
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Cricket and the Future of India
“What is cricket?” Does it represent the past or the future of India? The first time the question appears in Aravind Adiga’s Selection Day, Mumbai scout Tommy …
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American Storyteller
What makes American life meaningful? Apple products? Cat videos? Torrential pornography? The prospect of a lavish retirement? The senior prom? Forestalling your plunge into poverty? Prescription narcotics? Not so long ago the answers might have included: God, manifest destiny, gentleman farming, transmuting hardship into blues and jazz, abstract expressionism, white picket fences, the great American…
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Last Comic Standing
Why is a good novel like a joke? Before you think too hard, relax: there’s no single punch line here. I’m simply drawing attention to what might be a fruitful comparison. Like a joke, a good novel brings relief or provides escape. Both might make us laugh. Both upend audience assumptions. And both often find…
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Why Nixon Is Tricky for Novelists
We have Nixon to kick around again. During the election and then early presidency of Donald Trump …
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Rachel Cusk’s Disappearing Act
In 2001, after a decade or so as the author of well-regarded, modest-prize-winning fiction, Rachel Cusk began to develop into a kind of memoirist provocateur …
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Elif Batuman’s Apprenticeship
MFA fiction programs may have no fiercer critic than Elif Batuman. She has mocked the writing workshop multiple times in print and mourned the kind of prose it …
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Singing in the Dark
They came to bury her with praises but, defeated once again by her sheer presence, their words shriveled and rotted in the monsoon damp. As Mahasweta Devi’s dead body lay in a Kolkata hospital on July 28, 2016, Indian politicians—many of whom Devi had fought throughout her life with great courage—queued up to make a…
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Caliban Blues
Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed is one of hundreds of rewritings of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. The adaptations began just over a decade after its first performance, in 1611, and for the past four …
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George Eliot, the Radical
Readers unfamiliar with the life story of Victorian novelist George Eliot might find Dinitia Smith’s historical novel The Honeymoon startling. Did the author of Middlemarch, born in 1819 to a land …
