Nation Topics - Fiction | The Nation

Ann Beattie is an artist of the things we don’t say, or can’t, and that find expression anyway.

In The Marriage Plot Jeffrey Eugenides can’t explain what happens to his characters without throwing in every last why.

With We Others, Steven Millhauser remains the master of the inevitable ending in American fiction.
 

In his novel Abbott Awaits, Chris Bachelder employs his comic wackiness to great effect.

Vulnerability was what made David Foster Wallace so beloved, but it often led him to surrender too much in his fiction.

Daniel Orozco, Orientation and Other Stories; Mercè Rodoreda, The Selected Stories of Mercè Rodoreda.

The Latin Boom writers failed to appreciate the work of fellow novelist Manuel Puig, who wrote about housewives and homosexuals.

The Free World is a novel about lives suspended at a moment when everything is uncertain. It is about frustration. Unfortunately, it too is frustrating.

The achievement of Juan José Saer’s fiction, next to its sensuousness, is its creation of an all-engulfing present.

For Joanna Ruocco, language is a multiplier of worlds, a portal to alternate realities.