The slowly panic-making power of Renata Adler’s novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark.

Applying neuroscience to the study of literature is fashionable. But is it the best way to read a novel?

Nikolai Leskov’s The Enchanted Wandered and Other Stories; Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself

In the short stories of Tenth of December, the impression of chaos belies a careful design.

The soul-destroying weariness in A.B. Yehoshua’s stories seems as old as time itself—and unique to contemporary Israel.

A Russian novelist’s fight, in life and art, to see the world afresh in all its cruelty and splendor.

In his writing and life, Thomas Bernhard led a charge in the opposite direction. His publisher always broke his fall.

How Argentine fiction about the Malvinas War conspires in a trick of perspective.

Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie; Andrey Platonov’s Happy Moscow

How thrillers inform spycraft, and the fictions that belie them both.