Nation Topics - Fiction | The Nation

Though still relatively unknown in the English-speaking world, the
Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard, who died in 1989 at
the age of 57, is widely recognized as one of the foremo

"I have never had such a bad feeling about a war ever before," wrote Sha
Twa Nee on the Prophecy Club message board in April.

In March 2001 a small Internet website in Delhi, tehelka.com, revealed
that two of its reporters had used a secret camera to tape senior
defense officials and political leaders accepting bribes

I've been bashfully mute amidst the chatter over Norman Rush's new novel, Mortals, because he wasn't on the modest list of Writers I Know About.

In 1890 the American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a
remarkable short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," about a woman--genteel,
educated, with more than a casual taste for intellectual l

Norman Rush's first novel, Mating (1991), opens with a nervous
but gripping epigram: "In Africa, you want more, I think." The speaker,
an unnamed American anthropologist who doesn't want

James Wood, the ferociously intelligent critic whose reviews appear
regularly in The New Republic and the London Review of
Books, has single-handedly done a great deal to improve

Editor's Note: With Leonard Kriegel's meditation on Saul Bellow's
1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March, we introduce a series
of occasional essays revisiting classic works of literature, history and
criticism.

As the bombs cease falling on Baghdad, and the world argues over an
American presence in Iraq, the publication of Diana Abu-Jaber's funny,
thoughtful second novel, Crescent, seems uncann

THE QUALITY OF LIFE REPORT: A Novel.
By Meghan Daum.
Viking. 309 pp. $24.95.