A child’s novel can be funny by revealing how much a child does know, after all.
Tag: Fiction
The Once and Future Temp
What can the history of the temp-work industry teach us about the precarity of modern working life?
The Euphoria of Influence: Jeffrey Eugenides’s “The Marriage Plot”
Rather than try to kill his literary parents, Eugenides embraces as many of them as possible.
All Tomorrow’s Warnings
Both left and right employ “speculative nonfiction” to imagine the world after climate change. But who will win the battle of the futurists?
B-Sides: Carmen Laforet’s “Nada”
When freedom will not arrive to us, can we get nearer to it?
It’s Your Turn to (Re)Write the Story
How can experimental fiction help to democratize storytelling?
The Worst of All Possible Worlds?
The most interesting science fiction is not about the future at all but about the present.
Can a Novel Be Silent?
John Cage's concerts taught us to hear silence. Can novels do the same?
B-Sides: Mary Butts’s “Armed with Madness”
The author’s pagan obsessions, like her chatty metacritiques of other modernist writers, set her apart from her contemporaries.
What Women Want
#MeToo has revived an enduring feminist question: What do women want, and how can they get it?
Greenwell’s “Cleanness”: From Debt to Care
Garth Greenwell challenges readers to see how sex—especially for queer people—might be an act of difficult but healing care.
Safe at Home in Late Capitalism
Baseball is ideal for explaining American economic precarity: the players try desperately to get home safe, but almost always fail to do so.
Public Picks 2020
Each year around this time we send our readers into summer with a thoughtfully curated list of the titles appearing over the past 12 months that dazzled, moved, and challenged us most.
Books and Abandonment
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season makes other authors’ moral delicacy look like condescension.
How to Read Short Stories Like an Underdog
Departing from a fixed form, some Latin American writers employed the short story as a laboratory of writing.
“The Places Where Things Blur”: Namwali Serpell on “The Old Drift”
“One of the reasons it took so long to write is that—as I would joke with my friends—I found myself writing the great Zambian novel.”
B-Sides: Graham Greene’s “Stamboul Train”
Strangers share a 1932 train ride from Belgium to Istanbul, a journey that reveals the dark changes already sweeping the continent.
The Kleist We Need
Heinrich von Kleist teaches how to resist heteronormativity, as well as how to imagine gender fluidity and a less restrictive masculinity.
Motherhood and Other Monsters
In The Babadook and The Need, the introduction of a monster amplifies preexisting anxieties, rather than generating fresh ones.
Caught Mapping
The fires that are burning across Australia are changing this place, quite possibly forever, and with it our natural, social, cultural, and political narratives.
