Tag
Fiction
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Rachel Cusk’s Diminishing Returns
“Cusk remains one of the most formally restless novelists of our time. The trouble is that this inventiveness may now be outpacing Cusk’s thinking.”
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Rash Reading, Slow Watching with Virginia Woolf and Chantal Akerman
In the hands of this writer and this filmmaker, “the mother” is someone with whom to have a lifelong conversation, a contested perspective through which to read the world.
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Xochitl Gonzalez on “Last Night in Brooklyn”
“The last few years in the marketplace have proven that there is a really rabid Latino readership out there for lots of kinds of books. And it’s very exciting.”
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Barometric Reading: Solvej Balle and the New Atmospheric Novel
“Despite what Knausgaard says about the novel’s fixation on time, On the Calculation of Volume is very much about volume: about the sounds, objects, and textures that fills the space of its pages.”
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Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions: Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann
“I come to the understanding I know nothing, and then I completely throw myself into the research.”
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B-Sides: Maurice Gee’s “Going West”
In Going West, Maurice Gee considers national identity, provincialism, and the difficulty of creating an authentic cultural voice in a geographically isolated country.
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Betwixt or Bewitched? Rethinking the “Middlebrow” with Dino Buzzati
Reframed as a “bewitched middlebrow,” Buzzati’s fiction re-enters literary history not as a comforting escape, but as a sharp tool for existential inquiry.
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How Translations Sell: Three U.S. Eras of International Bestsellers
A translation renaissance in US publishing just ended. And you probably missed it.
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Dark Academia Grows Up
R. F. Kuang uses the confluence of romantasy, academic satire, and dark academia to pose a more interesting set of questions. To wit: What is the magic that scholars find in the academy?
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Our Golden Age of Reading (Online)
There is an urgent need for new, more affirmative ways to participate in culture, especially against the ongoing systematic whiteness of publishing and the exclusivity of elite institutions.
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Once upon a Time in Tenoxtitlan
Two novels published in 2024 return to some of the best-known, canonical figures and episodes from Mexico’s past.
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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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“The Door’s Still Locked”: Fiction after Fascism
“Labor” forces us to ask: Who has power? “Horror” forces us to ask: Who is the monster? And the combination of the two, “Labor-as-Horror,” tells us to beware the uncomfortable fractures in our otherwise ordinary work.
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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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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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Marie Arana on “LatinoLand”
“The United States is not idea. We are human beings and nobody represents that more in my book than latinos.”
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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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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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Karla Cornejo Villavicencio on “Catalina”
“I find human behavior fascinating. I find it interesting. I find all of it confusing, every single aspect of it.”
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The Writing “I” and the Reading “I”: Sheila Heti and the New Frontiers of the Personal
In her latest, Sheila Heti embarks on an inverted Oulipian experiment, producing content in a fundamentally unrestricted manner.
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Escape Velocity: Sarah Manguso in Conversation with Tess McNulty
“It’s still a vast mystery to me how one can write knowing anything at all what they’re about to write.”
