Tag: Literature

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

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

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.

From the bisexual demimonde of prewar Paris to investigating Soviet war crimes, Józef Czapski’s life encapsulates the extremes of twentieth-century Europe.

The cult artist and author proves an evasive subject for biography, a fact that would surely have delighted him.

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

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

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

An interview with China Miéville.

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.

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

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

What makes biography good?

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.

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

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

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

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