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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Our Last Supper
“The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild” is a novel that insists on the limits of what fiction can do. Its happy ending, the reader realizes, is no happy ending at all.
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“I Love a Dialectical Reader, and Best Is a Dialectical Reader Who Cries”: Jordy Rosenberg and Annie McClanahan
“I really just wanted to write a novel—I guess to me, this feels very queer—but a novel that was about tenderness and militancy.”
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Proust Curious: Beyond the “Recherche”
À la recherche du temps perdu has its place in literary culture partly because it has influenced generations of writers.
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Proust Curious: “Time Regained“
“Certainly, if only our hearts were in question, the poet was right when he spoke of the mysterious threads which life breaks. But it is still truer that life is ceaselessly weaving them between beings.”
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And Soon: Lydia Millet and Emily Hyde
“The longer I’m alive, the more convinced I become that human exceptionalism is our original sin.”
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All of Our Stories Were War Stories: Jamil Jan Kochai and Kalyan Nadiminti
“I had an innate sense as a child that the war was a deep part of who my parents were, so tied up in how they told stories and how they understood reality and existed in the world.”
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The Poetics of Democracy: A Conversation with Devika Rege
“This novel is about a collective, but that collective is not the nation. It can only allude to the nation without becoming it.”
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Toward a New Abuelita Canon
The new abuelita canon is giving a sense of interiority to the lived and unlived lives of our abuelas.
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Drawn Together, Held Apart: Cristina Henríquez’s “The Great Divide”
Cristina Henríquez’s novel is the product of extensive historical research. It also comes amid a boom in scholarship on and depictions of Panama and the canal.
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Proust Curious: “The Captive“
“The possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself.”
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Aspire to Magic but End Up with Madness: Adam Ehrlich Sachs Speaks with Sunny Yudkoff
“I’m aiming for something emotional, psychological, but I want it as an emergent property.”
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“Agita”: Talking with Alexander Sammartino
“I feel that way every day of my life: ‘astray in errancy.’ I think that’s about being human.”
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Proust Curious: “Sodom and Gomorrah”
“It was only at that moment, more than a year after her burial, because of that anachronism, which so often prevents the calendar of facts from corresponding to the calendar of feelings, that I became conscious that she was dead.”
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To Gallop Again and Again into Failure: Kaveh Akbar and Pardis Dabashi
“What can be said with language, a human invention, about something as ineffable and ephemeral as love or desire or rage or loneliness or despair, fear of God?”
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Proust Curious: “The Guermantes Way”
“So, too, the truth in politics, when one goes to well-informed men and imagines that one is about to grasp it, eludes one.”
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Dirt Bag Novels: Lydia Kiesling in Conversation with Megan Ward
“When I think about the novels that sort of shaped me as a younger reader, they’re often books that I call the dirt bag novel, which is sort of a reformulation of the bildungsroman.”
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Atomic Achilles: On Benjamín Labatut’s “The Maniac”
“‘The Maniac’ isn’t interested in speculating, in the manner of science fiction, about where AI leads: whether to utopia, dystopia, or somewhere in between.”
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To Fix the University, Return to Moo U
Every time Sean Carswell teaches Jane Smiley’s “Moo” in his research writing class at California State University, a catastrophe at the fictional Moo University mirrors a crisis within CSU.
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Proust Curious: “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower”
“Thus it can be only after one has recognized, not without having had to feel one’s way, the optical illusions of one’s first impression that one can arrive at an exact knowledge of another person, supposing such knowledge to be ever possible.”
