Fiction

Browse our essays and reviews on fiction.

Underneath the Darkness

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

  • Aaron Bady

Paul Park’s Hidden Worlds

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

  • John Crowley

Still Tilting at Windmills

On the 400th anniversary of Cervantes’s death, Spain struggles to honor its literary heritage

  • Stephen Phelan

Writing Under Surveillance

On the subversive fiction of East German writer Wolfgang Hilbig.

  • Tyler Curtis

Come On Up, Sweetheart

James Baldwin’s letters to his brother.

  • Ed Pavlić

The Gore Vidal Museum

The author's bid against being forgotten.

  • Daniel Luzer

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Archipelagos of Experience

Translating Southeaster by Haroldo Conti.

  • Jessica Sequeira

Light Fades in East Berlin

An Interview with Eugen Ruge.

  • John Shakespear
  • Eugen Ruge

Let’s Be Real

Two books by Roxane Gay reflect on the state of feminism.

  • Lucy McKeon

Muted Protest

  • Tobi Haslett

Samuel Beckett, the Early Years

A lost story shows the young writer struggling in Joyce's shadow

  • Roger Boylan

The Big Dig

Steven Moore's The Novel: An Alternative History (1600-1800)

  • Roger Boylan

Does Reading Literature Make You More Moral?

Literature helps shape what we consider to be moral in the first place.

  • Paula M.L. Moya

Exploring the Hidden China

Yu Hua's Boy in the Twilight.

  • Drew Calvert

Made to Burn: Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers

A nominee for the National Book Award.

  • Marta Figlerowicz

Do the Right Thing

On Italo Calvino’s letters, 1941–1985.

  • Leland de la Durantaye

Awakening

Muriel Rukeyser’s recently uncovered novel tells the story of a young woman coming of age—politically, sexually, intellectually—in a country at war.

  • Cecily Parks

Hardscrabble

The novel House of Earth shows Woody Guthrie in a different light, exiled from the Dust Bowl but dreaming of it still.

  • Megan Pugh

Debts

In Peter Stamm's World, We All Have Them

  • Roger Boylan

White Flights

On American fiction’s racial landscape.

  • Jess Row

The Varieties of Blackness

An interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

  • Aaron Bady

Black in Time

Kiese Laymon's Novel Explores the Messy Complexity of Race in America

  • Lucy McKeon

The Greater Gatsby

Fitzgerald's novel is overrated, but the new film version deserves more credit than it has received.

  • Alan A. Stone

Unacceptable

Paul Goodman was thinking globally and acting locally before it became a slogan.

  • Judith Levine
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