Black Refuge and the Novel of Ideas: A Conversation With Maya Binyam Black Refuge and the Novel of Ideas: A Conversation With Maya Binyam
“Fiction is so incredibly rife with ethical questions.”
Aug 3, 2023 / Books & the Arts / Rosemarie Ho
What Happened to Peter Handke? What Happened to Peter Handke?
How an artist obsessed with interiority and language become a literary pariah.
Jul 26, 2023 / Books & the Arts / David Schurman Wallace
In the Shadow of Sappho In the Shadow of Sappho
Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho is a unique work of fiction that resembles a group biography on the travails of 20th-century queer feminist artists.
Jul 13, 2023 / Books & the Arts / Lily Houston Smith
The Strange Legacy of “Francisco,” a Novel of Black Bohemianism The Strange Legacy of “Francisco,” a Novel of Black Bohemianism
Over the years, Alison Mills Newman has become disillusioned with her work of experimental fiction. Its story is now caught between radical aesthetics and conservative politics.
Jul 12, 2023 / Books & the Arts / Stephen Kearse
Ron DeSantis, American Psycho Ron DeSantis, American Psycho
The Florida governor’s irony-poisoned ad uses far-right memes to sanction homophobic and transphobic violence.
Jul 10, 2023 / Jeet Heer
Aleksandar Hemon’s Kaleidoscopic Fiction of War and Peace Aleksandar Hemon’s Kaleidoscopic Fiction of War and Peace
While most of his studies of dislocation were set in the present, in his new novel he examines a lost past.
Jul 10, 2023 / Books & the Arts / Adam Kirsch
Don DeLillo’s Cold Wars Don DeLillo’s Cold Wars
His 1980s novels take the story of America’s postwar years, usually seen as a triumphal rise to perpetual dominance, and converts it into one about a long and chaotic decline.
Jun 26, 2023 / Books & the Arts / Siddhartha Deb
Nona Fernandez and the Black Hole of Collective Memory Nona Fernandez and the Black Hole of Collective Memory
Her book-length essay Voyager examines life after Pinochet—and the disjunctures in public remembering the era produced—through an exploration of the stars.
Jun 22, 2023 / Books & the Arts / Amanda Paige Inman
Cormac McCarthy’s Unforgiving Parables of American Empire Cormac McCarthy’s Unforgiving Parables of American Empire
He demonstrated how the frontier wasn’t an incubator of democratic equality but a place of unrelenting pain, cruelty, and suffering.
Jun 21, 2023 / Books & the Arts / Greg Grandin
Eat, Pray, Cringe Eat, Pray, Cringe
Elizabeth Gilbert’s next novel faced outcry for its setting in Russia. So, before she could get canceled, she canceled herself.
Jun 14, 2023 / Katha Pollitt