Fiction and literature

Douglas Bauer on Julie Otsuka

Harking back to a book that may be speaking to us now in new ways

Jun 25

Review: Anthony Domestico on Susan Choi

Susan Choi’s novel begins with actual flashlights, and it goes on restlessly to search the darkness with beams of light and awareness

Jun 19

Review: Padgett Powell on “Wildcat,” a film about Flannery O'Connor

Can a movie convey the essence and the quintessence of what the author tried to do and who she was?

Jun 11

Review: Edward Mendelson on a new edition of Virginia Woolf’s Diaries

Virginia Woolf envisioned a diary that “coalesced” into something ”composed with the aloofness of a work of art.“ Have we done it justice?

Jun 4

Review: David Stromberg on Chaim Grade

Chaim Grade’s novel Sons and Daughters, which was published serially in the New York Yiddish press in the 1960s and 70s, appears in English in 2025

May 28

Review: Anna DeForest on Yiyun Li’s “Things in Nature Merely Grow”

On learning to suffer better

May 21

Diary: J. M. Coetzee, (2) Mother Tongue

Can a writer’ find his work beyond the boundaries of one language?

May 8

Diary: J. M. Coetzee, (1) Mother Tongue

A writer who made his name writing in English tries to leave it behind

May 7

Diary: W. G. Sebald on Literature after Fascism

Reckoning with a notion of “home” that demands abolishing all dissent and nuance, elevating narrow-mindedness to a universal principle

Mar 26

Review: Mona Simpson on Lewis Hyde

Giving without expectation of return, remembering in order to forget

Mar 12

Diary: Jamaica Kincaid, The Kind of Gardener I Am Not

Encountering "the grandness of a living member of the vegetable kingdom blooming without wanting to be cared about by me or anyone who came before me"

Mar 9

Diary: Wendell Berry, The Writer Going Home

Embracing “the few square miles in Kentucky that were mine by inheritance and by birth and by the intimacy the mind makes with the place it awakens in”

Mar 2

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