What is science fiction for? A good friend says that in imagining other worlds, science fiction helps us understand our own. Such work addresses scientific ...
Tag: Literature
How Capitalism Changed American Literature
Fifty years ago, almost every publisher in the United States was independent. Beginning in the late 1960s, multinational corporations consolidated the industry ...
B-Sides: Iraj Pezeshkzad’s “My Uncle Napoleon”
In the central courtyard, in the middle of a family party, in mid-century Tehran, a fart rings out. Or was it a fart? A cat? A cat’s fart? The sound of a chair being ...
The Book That Made Me: An Animal
The Lives of Animals was the first book I read in college—or at least the first book I read in a strange, amazing seminar that rewired my brain in the first semester ...
What Were the Women of “Thrones”?
There’s something attractive about watching Game of Thrones’ labyrinthine drama unfold in a world where stone, wood, and steel reign supreme. Amid ...
Authorship After AI
Authorship attribution is helpful if you suspect fraud: for instance, if you believe that Shakespeare wasn’t educated enough to write the plays, or that Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was really ...
When Dogs Bite
“I could tell you that I was beating the dog because I was beaten, that I was six and stupid and knew no better,” Marwand recounts to his cousin Zia in eastern Afghanistan. “But here is the other ...
Madeline Miller on “Circe,” Mythological Realism, and Literary Correctives
Madeline Miller is a Boston-born writer who currently lives in Philadelphia. Her degrees include a BA and ...
Kafka Transformed
Franz Kafka’s Gregor Samsa has undergone numerous metamorphoses in English: into “a gigantic insect,” “a monstrous vermin,” “a monstrous cockroach,” “some sort of monstrous insect,” and “a monstrous bug” ...
B-Sides: J. R. Ackerley’s “We Think the World of You”
J. R. Ackerley’s We Think the World of You (1960) isn’t a novel I’d ever say I ...
Public Picks 2019
Each year around this time we send our readers into summer with a curated list of the titles that dazzled, challenged, and inspired us most over the past year. For this, the seventh-annual edition of ...
The Return of Homer’s Women
Emily Wilson’s Odyssey, Pat Barker’s Silence of the Girls, and Madeline Miller’s Circe speak the lost and muted voices of ancient Greek women ...
B-Sides: Edward P. Jones’s “All Aunt Hagar’s Children”
A Jones story can break just about every writing workshop edict in its handling ...
What the Constitution Means to Us
On June 22, 1999, Jessica Lenahan’s estranged husband, Simon Gonzales, abducted their three daughters from outside Jessica’s house, in Castle Rock ...
Adoption and the Abundance of Narrative
Adoption narratives are hard to tell. This is ironic given that adoptions are fueled by stories. Birth parents tell themselves that giving up their child is for the best and ...
“Who Knows If They Found Any Burial At All?”
In the novels and short stories about Ferrara that he published in the 1950s and ’60s, Giorgio Bassani uncovered the Fascist side of his hometown that many ...
Fairy Tales of Race and Nation
In its own allusive way, Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread considers the imminent departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union. A textbook in ...
B-Sides: Russell Hoban’s “Riddley Walker”
Growing up, I knew and loved a string of books written by Russell and illustrated by Lillian Hoban. My sister and I read them—The Mole Family’s Christmas, The ...
Millennials in Beattieland
No word haunts discussions of Ann Beattie like the word generation. Once upon a time, back when novelists still had the luxury of holding their publicity at a ...
Public Thinker: Jack Halberstam on Wildness, Anarchy, and Growing Up Punk
Defying disciplinary categorization, Halberstam’s work draws on ...
