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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Book of Aron" is a book about annihilation, and the human spirit that somehow lives on, in slivers and cracks....

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

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....

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....

Maybe a good life is just living long enough to figure out some essential truth....

Les Plesko and the Art of Writing...

In 'Nora Webster', Colm Tóibín Reexplores Childhood Abandonment ...

Eimear McBride felt that a part of life wasn’t being expressed through straightforward language....

As in the best speculative fiction, the allegory of Goodhouse is complex and doesn’t map cleanly onto a single set of ideas....

Amy Wilentz on The Children Act ...