Nation Topics - Fiction | The Nation

In The Ask, Sam Lipsyte never ventures beyond the comfort zone of his eloquently damaged protagonist.

In Tove Jansson's The True Deceiver, the uncertainties laid bare go to the heart of human relationships.

For Herta Müller, writing is not a matter of trusting, but rather of the honesty of the deceit.

The Latin American utopia has disappeared, says novelist and crackero Jorge Volpi, and he displays little nostalgia for it.

Juan Carlos Onetti immerses himself in reality just long enough to fashion an escape. This is his peculiar gift.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.

Pre-emptive evolution, the voices of time, infodumps: the science fiction of J.G. Ballard offers not prescience but present-sense.

Maureen Howard's most recent novel is The Rags of Time.

The axis of moral struggle, a stroke of salvation--these are the spiritual dimensions of Tolstoy's late fiction.

J.M. Coetzee's Summertime and the fictions of self-deception.