Nation Topics - Fiction | The Nation

For all the ways it is rife with tenderness, fury and ugliness, William Faulkner’s fiction is stubbornly persistent in its artistry.

Edward P. Jones’s characters know that everything they’ve worked for might suddenly be taken from them.

If you get to the top, only to find that the voice hounding you with charges of inauthenticity is your own, what then?

Says editor Dan Wakefield, hIs writing “is done with such seemingly simple language and style that it sometimes seems shocking.”

In Black Bazaar, characters vent and stumble over their shared obsession with the colonial past.

Nothing ages faster than the idea of an “ageless” writer. Consider the posthumous career of Henry James.

In The Expendable Man, the story of an innocent under suspicion is given a racial twist.

A.M. Homes’s May We Be Forgiven; Sherman Alexie’s Blasphemy.

Maureen F. McHugh's After the Apocalypse; Joshua Cohen's Four New Messages

The Beginner’s Goodbye, The Chemistry of Tears and the burden of inheritance.