Literary Criticism
Story Stream
Perfecting the Art of Pedantry February 21, 2025
Who exactly is Eduardo Torres?Any proper answer would have to come in phases. For starters, Torres is (or was—his existential standing is a matter of debate) a provincial literary critic hailing from San Blas, Mexico; an enemy of some and and mentor ...
The Harrowing Ardor of Heather Lewis February 21, 2025
Heather Lewis is lying on a bed with her shoes off and her hands behind her head. The bed is without a blanket or cover, just two pillows on which Lewis rests her head. Her socks are dirty, her shirt tucked into her belted jeans. The walls are bare; ...
The Haunting Fiction of Han Kang February 11, 2025
A woman is walking along a cold seaside plain lined with thousands of black tree trunks. Together, the trunks create “the impression of a thousand men, women, and haggard children huddling in the snow.” Surely, she tells herself, this is a graveyard....
Olga Tokarczuk’s New Rules for Realism January 16, 2025
In his 1956 study The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, the Marxist philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukács distinguished between two literary traditions. Comparing the works of Thomas Mann, whom he considers a realist writer, with the works of F...
Escape Into the Present: On Hari Kunzru December 20, 2024
With the publication of Blue Ruin, Hari Kunzru has rounded off a loose trilogy about the cultural and political constitution of our present, stretching from 2017’s White Tears and continuing in 2020’s Red Pill. All are Künstlerromane—novels of the ar...
Trust the Critic? December 05, 2024
I have a working theory that honest criticism, when it comes to new fiction, is getting more difficult to find. This is the fault of institutions—professional book review sections, magazines, and journals. As the mainstream media withers, so do book ...
Alive and Kicking November 18, 2024
Toward the end of her 2008 essay “Two Paths for the Novel,” on the schism in contemporary literature between realism and conceptual fiction, Zadie Smith lists a few authors to be found in the middle. “At their crossroads,” she writes, “we find extrao...
Ghosts in the Mirror November 15, 2024
[Technique] in literature refers to writing which exhibits [particular tendency under discussion]. [Technique], demonstrated extensively in [Author]’s work [Title], published in [year], was a major element of [literary movement]. Critics often refer ...
Only in The New Yorker November 13, 2024
A book bearing the name Dorothy Parker ought to sell, so McNally Editions have been able to offer something interesting this month: a collection of book reviews! No essays or musings, no memoir, nothing that could or should be redone as a short story...
Is the Twentieth-Century Novel a Genre? November 13, 2024
Genres are the Sirens of literary criticism. They seem friendly and alluring, but they are dangerously elusive shape-shifters. You really have to lash yourself to the mast....
"Didion and Babitz" by Lili Anolik November 11, 2024
Joan Didion is revealed at last in this outrageously provocative and profoundly moving new work "that reads like a propulsive novel" (Oprah Daily) on the mutual attractions—and mutual antagonisms—of Didion and her fellow literary titan, Eve Babitz.Co...
The Many Forms of Rachel Cusk November 04, 2024
To judge by the critical response, Rachel Cusk’s new novel has left readers feeling betrayed. The nature of the betrayal depended upon what aspect of her work the critic once esteemed. For Dwight Garner of the New York Times, reviewing Parade meant r...
When Novels Speak a Language Only the Internet Gets November 04, 2024
In a new novel about a contemporary female artist, the chapter titles borrow from the names of real-world artworks, mostly by contemporary female artists. Very private little random possibilities, Chloe Wise, 2021; Small Beasts, Louise Howard, 2022; ...
Connectedly Different October 02, 2024
The text-based social web is dissolving. At its best, its limitations forced density and resulted in handfuls of superficial transcendence. It’s these qualities that drew me to Lydia Davis, Diane Williams, and Gertrude Stein’s shorter prose. Their bo...
On J.M. Coetzee’s Late Style September 27, 2024
There are a few obvious reasons we tend to be interested in a writer’s late works. For one, they allow us to indulge the superstition that the author is somehow more present, that the labor of their human hand is more clearly visible, whether through...
WH Auden’s Visions of England September 12, 2024
Edward Mendelson, WH Auden’s literary executor and editor, has called Nicholas Jenkins’s The Island “a Copernican revolution” in studies of the great poet. It’s a big claim, and for the first few dozen pages it looks as though it might be an exaggera...
Sinykin v. Lorentzen v. Esquire v. Barkan v. Perez August 12, 2024
I haven’t written one of these cultural roundups in a little while — and this might be the last one before the sharknado of election season coverage sweeps all before it. Which, unfortunately, may be just as well, because, on my tour of literary and ...
The Composer Has No Clothes August 02, 2024
In Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a fictional French writer recreates, word for word, chapters from Cervantes’s famous novel. The new version is not intended as a mere copy but as a subterranean reworking: “To...
A Garden Full of Monsters August 02, 2024
The title of José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night comes from a letter Henry James Sr. wrote to his sons Henry and William:Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy ...
The Salter Method July 25, 2024
A retrospective on Martin Amis in the Times of London has voiced a complaint made several times in recent years—that young male writers are at a disadvantage, today, not just because of declining numbers of men reading fiction (a complaint taken up i...
UwU It-Girls July 23, 2024
When I was about eleven a group of boys told me to google “dildo.” They told me it was a new Pokemon. That’s what reading My First Book, the new debut by Honor Levy, feels like. It’s like reaching into a jumbled bag of Red Scare goodies: emoticons, C...
It’s Okay to Take a Book Seriously July 22, 2024
You know something? I don’t think it’s wrong for an author to have a political standpoint or ideology that they seek to advance with their books. Nor do I think it’s wrong to take a book’s ideas at face value. When I read Tolstoy, I don’t think, “Oh,...
Formalism and Younger Poets July 22, 2024
Back in 1960, Robert Lowell punned on anthropological terms to divide American poetry into the raw and the cooked: poets, such as William Carlos Williams, who sought the impression of spontaneity (on the one hand) and poets (on the other) who revel i...
A High and Holy Art for All July 18, 2024
These days, the world of contemporary American poetry is less one world than many. Never has so much poetry been published; rarely have there been more “camps” or “contingents” that have little to say to each other. This is not necessarily bad news. ...
The Allure of the Literary Ranked List July 16, 2024
Like everyone else “into literature” and possessing an internet connection in the last week, I’ve been deeply invested in the New York Times’s “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” I’ve read 23 of them and included brief reviews of each below—some bo...
