Section
Literary Fiction
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“She Seems So Normal to Me”: Cassandra Neyenesch on Writing a Woman on the Verge
“I had never seen a narrative about an older woman and a younger man that was just a real relationship where they love talking to each other.”
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“Can the Dead Save the Living?”: Reading Han Kang During South Korea’s Martial Law Crisis
Can literature, by preserving past trauma, stop history from repeating itself?
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The Scenery of the Crime
Opera demands a generous sense of the preposterous. So too does the mystery novel.
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Time Interpolated
Disruptive and restorative, interpolation is the paradoxical form of life, literature, and time itself.
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After the Deluge: What Future for Climate Fiction?
Even in a world remade, the past defines the present.
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We Better Laugh About It: Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí
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: If you could spend a year anywhere, where, when, and how would you spend it? Álvaro Enrigue and critic Maia Gil’Adí…
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Chekhov’s Pandemic?
Even as Chekhov brings gloom befitting the pandemic to “Tom Lake” and “Our Country Friends,” these novels are irradiated by the theater.
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Who Owns These Tools?: Vauhini Vara and Aarthi Vadde
“The desire for that sort of purist kind of connection that one might call communion, is something that I’m interested in in all of my work.”
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“That In Between Time”: Fernanda Trías and Heather Cleary
“I always feel that when I write, it’s like weaving senses.”
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“Foolishness on the Page”: Talking with Zahid Rafiq
“What ends up in the writing is what the characters see, and what they see is determined by how they feel.”
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Aria Aber’s Defiant Love Letter to Berlin
“The experiences of coming of age and coming into art—of finding your own voice and a vision for your craft—are spiritual and psychological journeys, and, for lack of a better word, universal.”
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Planetary Boundaries are Non-Negotiable: Kim Stanley Robinson and Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
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: If you could spend a year anywhere, where, when, and how would you spend it? In Season 9, Novel Dialogue set…
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Monstrous Dreaming: Lauren Beukes and Andrew Pepper
“I guess my actual process is probably despair and cortisol.”
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Gatsby @ 100: American Classrooms, American Dreams?
The story of Gatsby, Nick, Tom, and Daisy is also, much more importantly, part of the history of hundreds of millions of student readers and their teachers, spanning eight decades.
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Wings, Angels, Tentacles: Talking with Siddhartha Deb
“What lies outside the weird—the subconscious, our dreams, our fantasies, the monster, the alien—these are possible sources of liberation.”
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Novels are Like Elephants: Ken Liu and Rose Casey
“All fictional works are in some sense defined by the moment they were written and what their authors were trying to experience.”
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Novel Dialogue Season 9 Trailer: Writing Against the System with Aarthi Vadde
In the trailer for Season 9 of Novel Dialogue, Aarthi Vadde looks at the web as the predominant platform of cultural life, and one that needs to be understood in light of literary history.
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Autofiction Writers of the World, Unite!
Immediacy, here, is an aesthetics of ambivalent aspiration, within a hierarchically ordered and immobilizing class- and race-based cultural system.
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“Who Made These Rules?”: Claire Messud on What’s Distracting from Good Writing
“I believe in the amazing complexities of what we can express and convey in language if people will only make the effort and take the time.”
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Beyond the Doom Loop of High Theory
If paradox can be toxic, what’s the antidote?
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Archives of the Surveilled
Arthur Huff Fauset’s elision from literary history was not merely a scholarly oversight but a reality constructed in advance by powerful forces.
