The inscrutable sincerity of Nell Zink

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Thomas De Quincey’s bad habits

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A motley crew steers Anne Carson’s FLOAT (Knopf, $30). There’s Edmund Husserl, Jean-Luc Godard, Joan of Arc, Pablo Picasso, mad Hölderlin, Hegel, a chorus of Gertrude Steins, and Carson’s noble,…

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Jonathan Safran Foer’s authorial intrusions

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The meaning of the game

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Thirty-six ways of looking at the aphorism

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It doesn’t matter that Ursula K. Le Guin has been winning awards for writing about aliens, wizards, and imaginary worlds since the 1960s — the label “science fiction” gives her…

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The rise of Trump

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The return of the Brat Pack

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Across the seven volumes of the Recherche, Proust mentions only one living artist by name — the fashion designer Mariano Fortuny. “Is it their historical character, or is it rather…

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In 1996, the Libyan writer Hisham Matar was living near the National Gallery in London. For six years straight he had been going to the museum, sometimes as often as…

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Sybille Bedford’s prudent hedonism

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Seamus Heaney’s journey to the underworld

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The past and future of dating

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Notes toward an understanding of Wallace Stevens

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Before she showed Pop paintings at the Whitney and the Guggenheim; before her madcap plays were performed at the Judson Poets’ Theater and La MaMa; before she traveled the female…

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The new docudrama The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story (FX) isn’t really about Orenthal James Simpson. It’s about the trials that ran alongside his — those informal,…

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The lyric essay’s convenient fictions

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Annie Dillard gets pickled

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Piecing together the GN’R story

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The Ohio River runs through C. E. Morgan’s second novel, THE SPORT OF KINGS (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27). It’s a “hungry current,” a “sucking current,” a “swamping weight” whose…

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Hail, Caesar!, the new film by Joel and Ethan Coen, starts and ends with a confession and a slap in the face. The movie covers a day in the life…

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Mark Leyner’s self-consuming fictions

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Why the Spanish Civil War feels so distant

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Halfway through David Means’s brilliant new novel, HYSTOPIA (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26) — a careening metafiction that hallucinates a post-Vietnam America governed by a third-term JFK in which gangs…

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“If we want to know what American normality is — i.e. what Americans want to regard as normal — we can trust television,” David Foster Wallace once wrote. Can we?…

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Religious conversion across the ages

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John Wray’s time machine

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