Fiction

Browse our essays and reviews on fiction.

Flesh and Statue

How do we separate David Foster Wallace the person from DFW the icon?

  • Trevor Quirk

An Embarrassment of Riches

Literature and the Ethics of Wealth in the Gilded Age

  • Gavin Jones

Forget Harry Potter

Adults Should Read Joan Aiken's Wolves

  • John Crowley

Forgetful Pleasures

Michel Houellebecq’s exciting tale of boredom.

  • Marta Figlerowicz

American Counterworld

Remembering Ray Bradbury (1920–2012)

  • John Crowley

Back in Time

Julian Barnes asks: How much of what we think makes us special is only a trick of memory?

  • Roger Boylan

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Unpacking

It’s strange to think of Katchor’s work as lifelike, but there it is. Its lifelikeness is partly a function of the felt possibility of ongoing randomness inherent in the comic-strip mode.

  • John Crowley

Where Love Grows

Eugenides’s novel The Marriage Plot is about becoming an adult, about moving, marrying, and making mistakes.

  • Leland de la Durantaye

Priest, Gangster, Drinker, Gent

Reading Flann in the birthplace of psychoanalysis. 

  • Roger Boylan

My Hungry Soul

Alfred Kazin’s raw materials.

  • Vivian Gornick

Seriously Funny

On Howard Jacobson, the Jewish Jane Austen.

  • Roger Boylan

How to Write About Africa

At the offices of Kwani—a literary agitator without peer. 

  • Anna Clark

The Novel Is Not Dead

Despite critics’ best attempts to kill it.

  • Jess Row

How to be Happy

The ethics of David Foster Wallace.

  • Leland de la Durantaye

Into the Breach

China Miéville’s other reality.

  • Henry Farrell

Saving Souls

David Grossman’s article of faith.

  • Vivian Gornick

Song of Solomon Transformed My Life

Dave Eggers interviews Junot Díaz

  • Junot Díaz
  • Dave Eggers

Life Work

Nicholson Baker grows up

  • John Crowley

Suppose You’re an Idiot

Mark Twain tells his own story.

  • Roger Boylan

The Ancient Dream

The tumultuous marriage of Leo and Sophia Tolstoy

  • Vivian Gornick

Between Two Worlds

Goli Taraghi accepts the Bita Prize.

  • Goli Taraghi

Man of Principle

The Passions of Arthur Koestler.

  • Roger Boylan

Last Wishes

On Nabokov’s Novel in Fragments.

  • Leland de la Durantaye

Desperately Seeking Sam

Remembering Beckett twenty years after his death.

  • Roger Boylan
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