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Tag: Fiction

Browse our essays and reviews on fiction.

Daniel A. Olivas

How can you have thoughts without words? The man turned back to his coffee and drank. It was cold. Breakfast was done. Time to move on.

Terry Nguyen

AI-generated novels are here, but they hardly spell the end of fiction.

Anna Krauthamer

Chantal Johnson’s debut novel, Post-Traumatic, makes the case that we can—by moving away from representations of individual suffering.

Johanna Winant

Reflecting on three monumental works of modernism a hundred years on.

Tadhg Larabee

László Krasznahorkai’s latest novel reflects on the power of the surveillance state through the perspective of a librarian who wishes to lock up all books.

Samuel Clowes Huneke

The celebrated novelist treated the past seriously, depicting its psychological complexity and drawing out its present-day political implications.

John Crowley

In her new book, Danish poet Olga Ravn writes with open love, pity, and compassion for her strange yet familiar creations.

Jennifer R. Bernstein
Known mainly as a realist, the writer used the gothic form to explore the horror of being confined by gender.
Nate File, Marlon James
Marlon James discusses writing realistic Black characters, being inspired by African folktales, and why we don’t have to let go of the world of make-believe to tell serious stories.
John Crowley
Amazon’s Tales from the Loop has introduced a new audience to the speculative worlds of the Swedish artist, whose books depict worlds in which humanity has, in one way or another, run afoul of technology.
Annie Howard
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven reminds us of the radical power of collective imagination.
John Crowley

Amidst a boys’ club of ’70s-era comics, Shary Flenniken’s Trots and Bonnie was unique for its feminist depiction of the political and sexual awakening of young women.

Boston Review
A recording of our digital reading of poetry, fiction, and essays from our annual literary anthology, with ASL interpreting.
Houman Barekat

Newly translated into English, Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel is a vivid portrait of immigrant displacement and the ironies of our global cultural ecosystem.

Boston Review
A recording of our discussion about the recovery of one of Wainaina’s lost stories and his continued importance to the African literary landscape.
Achal Prabhala, Binyavanga Wainaina
Celebrated writer Binyavanga Wainaina’s first piece of fiction was thought to be lost. Recently rediscovered, it appears here twenty-five years after it originally debuted.
Stephen Milder

The Greens are on track to become Germany’s second strongest party. For many, this is proof that abandoning radicalism was the right choice, but a new novel offers valuable insights into why it should be recovered.

Yeoh Jo-Ann, Cheswayo Mphanza, Ivelisse Rodriguez, Sonia Sanchez, Ed Pavlić, Tyehimba Jess, Domenica Ruta, Adam McGee
A recording of the launch event for Boston Review’s new literary anthology, Ancestors. Renowned writers read their poems, fiction, and more.
David B. Hobbs
Dennis Cooper became famous in the 1980s for his transgressive fiction about marginalized men. A new biography makes a case for what his works can offer readers now, in our era of deep suffering and infuriating indifference.
Mugambi Jouet

The French Algerian writer steadfastly defended democracy and humanity against dogmatic ideologies of all stripes. We need to read and reread him today.

Peter Coviello

In ‘Vineland’, his underappreciated 1990 novel, the author of ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ anticipated a United States in which security would become the greatest good. 

Dayton Martindale

Rereleased this year in a single volume, Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy Three Californias imagines three possible futures for the world writ large through the lens of Orange County, California.

Martin Gelin

Michel Houellebecq’s Islamophobia and chauvinism have made him a favorite intellectual of right extremists. So why does he appeal to so many on the left as well?

Matt Gallagher

Alternate histories like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America—newly adapted by HBO—force us to imagine a different America.

Marta Figlerowicz

Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness movingly depicts the vulnerabilities of queer desire, but it also continues a long tradition of exoticizing Eastern European sexuality.

Judith Levine

The artist exploded the idea of what a book can be. For him, it was not a thing, but an instrument—something to do something with.

Adom Getachew
Maaza Mengiste’s novels reject grand narratives, instead offering uncommonly intimate glimpses of what it was like to live through the century of war and dictatorship that created today’s Ethiopian diaspora.
Holly Case
The winner of the National Book Award for Translated Literature serves up an apocalyptic vision of Hungarian society.
Joy James

A timely new documentary celebrates Morrison’s novels, but downplays the enduring power of her work as an editor and essayist.

John Crowley

Science fiction author Ted Chiang wrote the story for the Academy Award–winning film Arrival. Now his new collection of short stories gives us further glimpses of possible futures.

Spencer Quong, Andrea Lawlor
Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is being celebrated as the vanguard of a new trans lit. In this interview, Lawlor talks about Paul’s origins, trans identity, and the future of queer literature.
Jae Won Chung
Hye-young Pyun’s surreal, violent novels reject stereotypes about Korean women’s writing, taking up global themes of environmental collapse and the loneliness of city life.
Marta Figlerowicz

Novelist Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the Booker International Prize, presents a multicultural Poland, to the ire of the Polish far-right.

John Feffer

Hwang Sok-yong’s novel Familiar Things sounds a warning about the pitfalls of Korean reunification.

Gaiutra Bahadur

Neel Mukherjee is part of a new generation of Indian writers dissecting postcolonialism’s failed promise of a classless society.

John Crowley

A science fiction writer remembers his early correspondences with Ursula Le Guin.

Henry Farrell

We live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s.

Stephen Phelan

His novels might be read as a fictive analogue to Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States: a polyphonic chronicle of the betrayal of his country’s original promise.

Tananarive Due
After the slave trade and colonization, history has become a dystopia.
Nalo Hopkinson
Nalo Hopkinson on the politics of dystopia, writing from the Global South, and the enduring importance of black mermaids.
Peter Ross

From invading Afghanistan to dismantling Confederate monuments, George Orwell has been pressed into the service of all sorts of causes. But the real Orwell remains unknown.

Marta Figlerowicz

A new generation of young Polish novelists has turned to dystopia to express Poland's cultural and economic contradictions.

Peter Ross, Paul Kingsnorth

Celebrated dystopian novelist Paul Kingsnorth talks surviving the collapse of civilization as we know it.

Anjuli Raza Kolb

Emile Habiby's absurd fictions offer a map for surviving impossible political conditions.

Ulka Anjaria

On Indian literature in English after Arundhati Roy.

Judith Levine

Our democracy may depend on government workers, and indeed all of us, saying "I would prefer not to."

Aaron Bady

Yuri Herrera's first two novels explore Mexican border identity. 

John Crowley

Paul Park’s fantasy troubles the line between fiction and reality.

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