Rachel Cusk’s unforgiving eye

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It’s hard for bookish people not to romanticize the act of reading—as a spur to imagination and compassion for others or just an escape from whatever real-life trap you may…

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Helen DeWitt’s uncompromising fictions

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The bowdlerization of Jean Rhys

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The impossible work of motherhood 

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The year 2017 was, I presume, an awkward, anxious moment to be named poet laureate of the United States. What the writer owes the collective and where she fits within…

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Alan Hollinghurst’s break with tradition 

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The troubling response to a memoir of incest

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Does fiction matter in a post-fact age?

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The surprising legacy of a ninety-year-old peace pact

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My first and still most vivid memory of a Woody Allen movie is of the scene in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)…

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Three novels of Egypt’s repressive present

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The Armies of the Night fifty years on

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A philosopher’s flat-footed meditations on the beautiful game

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Elizabeth Hardwick’s political conscience 

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When you consider the savagery of your run-of-the-mill fairy tale, our use of the term to connote “romance” or “idealization” smacks of nothing more than romance and idealization — a…

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Jennifer Egan’s shallow depths

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Feminist struggles are labor struggles 

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When last we heard from Isabel Archer, she was on her way from London back to Rome, where her husband, the cruel, cosmopolitan aesthete Gilbert Osmond, was waiting. That’s how…

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The nightmare logic of Twin Peaks

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Henry David Thoreau as prophet, naturalist, and stealth comedian

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Before he invented telegraphic code, Samuel Morse was a portrait painter. In the winter of 1825, he left his family in Connecticut and traveled to Washington, D.C., for a sitting…

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Does the social novel have a future?

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Nicole Krauss and her precursors 

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We are ushered into a feminine world on page 1 of David Plante’s DIFFICULT WOMEN (New York Review Books, $16.95), when the author meets Jean Rhys in a South Kensington… 

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Discussed in this essay: Chester B. Himes: A Biography, by Lawrence P. Jackson. W. W. Norton. 640 pages. $35. Early in Chester Himes’s first and best-known novel, If He Hollers…

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I write this month from my parents’ home in New Jersey, to which I have escaped, with my baby son, from the jackhammers tearing down the parapets of our apartment… 

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In Marie ­NDiaye’s novel MY HEART HEMMED IN (Two Lines Press, $14.95), Nadia and Ange, a middle-aged couple from Bordeaux, become outcasts. “What sort of wickedness, I ask myself, are they suddenly… 

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