Nation Topics - Fiction | The Nation

John Steinbeck's forlorn protagonists, Lennie and George, summon few comparisons in today's landscape of mainstream literary fiction, overstocked with tales of redemption.

In 1886 the British are fighting an imperial war on another continent
with the express goal of suppressing and maintaining control of the
natives. Sound familiar?

Genealogy rules Latino literature tyrannically.

Given the number of prematurely world-weary young men and women who
followed the lure of easy money, cheap alcohol and even cheaper sex to
the geopolitical discount bins of the former Soviet Un

Why is so much fiction written in our language and why is so much of
what is written of so little consequence?

It's easy to find fault with Blue Shoe, Anne Lamott's sixth
novel.

When the University of Nebraska Press sent my review copy of the
Selected Short Stories of Weldon Kees with a note asking that I
please accept the book with the compliments of the author

A few months ago, novelist Alan Furst, in one of those New York
Times "Writers on Writing" pieces, told how, on a magazine
assignment to the Soviet Union back in 1983, he suddenly discov

In 1967 the world-renowned if somewhat Dickensianly named sexologist
John Money was offered a case he couldn't refuse.

"Felisberto Hernández is a writer like no other," Italo Calvino
announced once, "like no European, nor any Latin American.