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Tag: Literature

Browse our essays and reviews on literature.

Terry Nguyen

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

Samuel Moyn

Lionel Trilling crystallizes the cynical Cold War liberalism that sacrificed idealism for self-restraint.

Junot Díaz

The novel Kindred reminds us—emphatically, gruesomely—that white supremacy is us too.

Robin D. G. Kelley

In her scholarship, mentoring, and activism, Farah Jasmine Griffin brings a praxis of radical love to an unequal academy.

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.

John Crowley

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

Jules Joanne Gleeson

A new book offers a compelling, if imperfect, account of the bad feelings with which trans people often struggle.

Jack Parlett
Leo Bersani was a groundbreaking queer studies scholar who rejected the word “queer.” We can still learn from his contrarian sense of what made homosexuals unique.
Judith Levine
Some feminists think we can improve motherhood. But what if abolishing it is the only way to alleviate its problems?
Jennifer R. Bernstein
Known mainly as a realist, the writer used the gothic form to explore the horror of being confined by gender.
Marissa Grunes
Two recent essay collections explore the interplay between literary genre and a rapidly changing planet.
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.
A recording of our virtual literary event with three generations of Black women writers.
Farah Jasmine Griffin

Toni Morrison’s novels imagine a society governed by an ethic of care, devoted to restoring and repairing those who have been harmed, and giving them the space for transformation.

John Crowley

A recent government report gave UFOs a rebrand, but so many basic questions remain unanswered.

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.

Vivian Gornick

Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship with her readers was a mutually demanding collaboration.

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?

The Florentine humanist’s description of the Black Death in the Decameron remains one of the most thoughtful accounts of a society living under a pandemic.

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.

David Herd, Lytton Smith
An ancient pilgrimage route inspires a project of cooperative storytelling which pairs writers with detained immigrants, such as the Mexican horticulturalist in this story.
Elizabeth Hand, John Crowley
Celebrated novelists John Crowley and Elizabeth Hand discuss Hand’s new novel and the ways that historical fiction can and cannot answer our questions about the past.
Joel Christensen

The beauty of the language should not keep us from reckoning with its history.

Jonathan Beecher Field
When conservatives declare the death of the English major, they highlight the need for the critical thinking skills that English departments excel at teaching.
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.

Marta Figlerowicz
From the bisexual demimonde of prewar Paris to investigating Soviet war crimes, Józef Czapski’s life encapsulates the extremes of twentieth-century Europe.
John Crowley
The cult artist and author proves an evasive subject for biography, a fact that would surely have delighted him.
Mark Bould
Trump’s Space Force is a bad reboot of the old imperial fantasy of control from above.
Marta Figlerowicz
A new anthology is dedicated to the scholar who saw nostalgia as a radical rebellion against modern ideas of time.
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.

China Miéville

An interview with China Miéville.

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.

Merve Emre

Bad readers were not born; they were created. To know them is to understand literature and politics in postwar America.

Nalo Hopkinson
Nalo Hopkinson on the politics of dystopia, writing from the Global South, and the enduring importance of black mermaids.
Vivian Gornick

What makes biography good?

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.

John Crowley

On this day, the Crows of the region joined the history of People, and their own history began.

Junot Díaz
Junot Díaz introduces Global Dystopias.
Merve Emre

The personal essay is not dead, but has it traded politics for style?

John Tinnell

Walden is often championed as an anti-technology manifesto. But this misses the value Thoreau found in conversations spread across vast spans of time and distance.

Junot Díaz, Margaret Atwood

Junot Díaz interviews Margaret Atwood about The Handmaid's Tale, political dystopias, and Drake.

Marta Figlerowicz

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

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