Desire in a Drought
Anna Mavromati discusses Catherine Chanter's debut novel and the power of rare commodity.
Fiction
"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." — Mark Twain
What Are Novels For?: Privilege, Race, and Shelter in Nell Zink’s “Mislaid”
Zink delights in the possibilities of fiction and the pleasures of playing with words, one-liners, and genres.
Lies Like Truth: On Fiction, Reality, and Fictional Reality
Contemporary readers, many brought up on tell-all memoirs, reality shows, and talk shows, now often seem confused about what were once easily discernible borders.
Enigmatic Interiors: On Love, Death, Divorce, and Michael White’s New “Travels in Vermeer”
The book is deceptive … a travel book that is really an art book; an art book that is really about love, death, drinking, and other kinds of grief.
Everything Was in the Making
This book is for the pioneers at heart: those who want to be in the garage with Steve Jobs, on the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, at Cape Canaveral in 1961.
The “Cosmological Nothingness” of Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi on unstable language, paranoid reading, and the Persian-French influences of her experimental thriller "Fra Keeler."
Antoine Volodine’s Post-Exoticism
The literary movement called “post-exoticism,” practiced by a group of imprisoned revolutionaries in a fictional devastated world, bursts with invention.
Secure Your Own Mask Before Helping Others
A trapdoor is most alarming when you don't see it; knowing the floor might give way at any moment allows you to brace yourself for the fall.
Life Is Governed by Intention
The scope of Diamond Head is ambitious and sweeping, spanning the anti-imperialist Boxer Rebellion through Pearl Harbor to the beginnings of the sexual revolution.
“Siphoning Away the Warmth”: On Jim Shepard’s Radical Empathy
"The Book of Aron" is a book about annihilation, and the human spirit that somehow lives on, in slivers and cracks.
Season of Saul
A review of the first volume of Zachary Leader's new biography of Saul Bellow.
A Patron Saint for Sadsacks: What Snark Says About Failure — and What Literature Says Back
If the violence of these stories is often shocking, their logic is predictable. A would-be novelist experiences catastrophe.
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