LITERARY FICTION

New York Trance — Geoff Dyer and the Life of the Writer

In Dyer's repetitions and leitmotifs, we get the sense of watching a mind traveling between planes of existence....

TOBY LLOYD

NONFICTION

FICTION

LITERARY FICTION

Bali Diary: At the 2015 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival

A visit to the 2015 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali....

MARIA BUSTILLOS

LITERARY FICTION

A Strange Mind: An Interview with Orhan Pamuk

The novel is about modern city life, and the characters may be poor, but they are very modern. Their problem is adjusting to the individuality of the city....

BRUCE ROBBINS

FICTION

LITERARY FICTION

Here Be Dragons: On Literary Cartography

Andrew DeGraff's "Plotted: A Literary Atlas" is a book of maps based on great works of literature....

JONATHAN RUSSELL CLARK

ART & ARCHITECTURE

LITERARY FICTION

All Is Permitted, All Over Again: Oliver Ready’s Translation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”

Oliver Ready's translation of Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" shows what reactionary work it was....

BORIS DRALYUK

LITERARY FICTION

The Ground Beneath His Feet

Veteran Rushdie readers will find in his most recent novel, "Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights," familiar hallmarks of his imagination....

BINA GOGINENI

LITERARY FICTION

Superheroes in a Time of Terror: Rushdie’s 1001 Nights

Comic books, climate change, and caliphates in Salman Rushdie's "Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights."...

ANDREW LANHAM

LITERARY FICTION

Postcards from the Threshold

Joy Williams's stories, especially when read collectively, challenge the plausible and demand a reader's participation, a leap of faith....

JERUSHA JOY EMERSON

FICTION

LITERARY FICTION

Vladimir Nabokov, American Vagabond

Vladimir Nabokov wasn’t born in the USA — and that made his take on America important....

BORIS DRALYUK

LITERARY CRITICISM

LITERARY FICTION

The Past Is Useless

Not only in interviews but in the novels themselves, Knausgaard has proven his own best critic....

BEN PARKER

LITERARY FICTION

Find this, Americans, and get it into your bones

— The Dying Grass and other Dreams of William T. Vollmann...

NICK HOLDSTOCK

FICTION

LITERARY FICTION

Manifold Destiny

Vollmann wishes for a release from ahistoricism that deprives Americans of the perspective needed to grapple capably with problems arising in the present....

CHRISTOPHER K. COFFMAN

FICTION

LITERARY FICTION

What Rubbish They Publish

The Prank proves Anton Chekhov could write hilarious stories from an early age....

BOB BLAISDELL

FICTION

LITERARY FICTION

Dancing in the Air

Perhaps an essential thing Kundera's late style reveals is that the senile sublime has lurked in his prose all along....

JENNY HENDRIX

LITERARY FICTION

“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....

NICHOLAS MIRIELLO

FICTION

LITERARY FICTION

A Force That Could Not Be Restrained

Elizabeth Berg's voluptuous new novel, "The Dream Lover," deftly illuminates the interior life of French Romantic writer George Sand....

JILL BIALOSKY

LITERARY FICTION

Humor Is Vengeance

Where satire is an act of lifting the veil to expose the truth, in "The Sellout" Paul Beatty lifts the veil over race in America to find several contradictory truths....

DOTUN AKINTOYE

LITERARY FICTION

I Dare Not: The Muted Style of Writer in Exile Ha Jin

As a new generation of Chinese writer-exiles settles in the West, we wonder whether Jin’s flat, alienating style will come to be regarded as a kind of artifact, a self-preserving fossil of the trauma generated by those who witnessed the mixture of real and manufactured emotion that fueled a collective mania....