Malaga Girl, Navigation of Bones, by Daniel Minter © The artist. Courtesy Greenhut Galleries, Portland, Maine Like William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Paul Harding’s imaginary New England…

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On Cormac McCarthy

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Pearl, by Gail Spaien © The artist. Courtesy Nancy Margolis Gallery “Animals are in trouble all over the world.” So begins Justice for Animals (Simon and Schuster, $28.99), a call to…

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How not to become an anarchist

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The Ottoman army capturing Belgrade, from a sixteenth-century manuscript © Gianni Dagli Orti/Shutterstock The finest historical fiction—Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, for example—renders the strange grippingly familiar; so too do…

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A provocative history of Indigenous America

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On Casanova

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The Birth of Venus, by Sandro Botticelli. Courtesy the Uffizi Gallery, Florence When telling a story, history’s imperfect record sometimes insists upon inconvenient gaps. This is the case with Botticelli’s…

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On Elizabeth McCracken’s irreducible fiction

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Inside the world of Louise Bourgeois

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The battles over T. S. Eliot’s legacy

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Photograph of Elias Canetti, 1983, by Marie-Louise von Motesiczky © Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust. Courtesy Tate Archive In 1980, the year before Elias Canetti won the Nobel Prize in…

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VN-K-001 (detail), by Lyndon Barrois Jr. Courtesy the artist Few writers can inhabit multiple characters with equal intensity and vivacity, and most who can are, of course, playwrights or screenwriters.…

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What time did to Christopher Hitchens

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“Chalk Drawings,” by Aziz Hazara © The artist. Courtesy Experimenter, Kolkata, India With David Unger’s brilliant translation of Mr. President (Penguin Classics, $17.99), by the Guatemalan Nobel Prize–winner Miguel Asturias, readers…

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The lost worlds of Abdulrazak Gurnah

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On Willem Frederik Hermans

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“Domestic Pig—Sus scrofa domestica,” by Henry Horenstein, from the series Animalia © The artist Gustave Flaubert famously wanted to write “a book about nothing,” sustained only by “the internal force…

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On Vladimir Sorokin

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Hernan Diaz dismantles the American dream

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“Representation #16?18 (matchbook),” by Cynthia Greig © The artist. Courtesy Clark Gallery, Lincoln, Massachusetts Readers of Elif Batuman’s delightful first novel, The Idiot, will need no introduction to its sequel,…

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Seeing Auden in a new light

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“Gary Indiana Veiled,” 1981, by Peter Hujar © 2022 The Peter Hujar Archive/Artists Rights Society, New York City Few writers are as keenly alive to absurdity or write with as…

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Jennifer Egan’s old-world internet novel

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On the forgotten father of film

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Self-portrait with Scorpion, by Leonor Fini, from Leonor Fini: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, which was published last year by Scheidegger & Spiess © Leonor Fini Estate, Paris/Artists Rights…

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The elusive fiction of Claire-Louise Bennett

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On Thom Gunn

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