Fiction and literature

Review: Geoffrey O’Brien on C. F. Ramuz

I came upon this book‘s 1944 edition on my parents’ bookshelves when I was around eleven, attracted irresistibly by its doom-laden prologue …

23 hrs ago

Diary: (2) Marina Warner on “The Books That Made Me”

Marina Warner has come to believe that we can’t live without the imaginative structures of myths and folktales, we absolutely need them, and she wonders…

Jul 25

Diary: (1) Marina Warner on “The Books That Made Me”

Serious readers once disparaged fairy tales and folklore as childish preoccupations but one reader came to see them as the building blocks of a communal…

Jul 23

Diary: Jean McGarry, New glasses

Reading Svetlana Alpers , studying Van Gogh and Vermeer, and getting new glasses

Jul 9

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

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