American Novelists
Story Stream
Substack and the American Novel April 24, 2025
Most 21st century novels don’t matter much. They matter, of course, to the people who write them, and to whatever dwindling subset of the wider public still reads them, but, here in America, at least, the majority of folks couldn’t care less. Of cour...
The Last of the Boom April 23, 2025
Writer, Nobel laureate, and sometime Peruvian presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa died last week at the age of eighty-nine. He was the last surviving member of the “Boom,” a dazzling generation of Latin American novelists who made their name in...
Richard Ford, Late Master August 22, 2023
In the basement of my apartment building is a laundry room with a bookshelf. Tenants leave behind old books and you’re free to browse and take what you’d like. There’s a healthy mix of shlock and high-brow; this Brooklyn rental building includes nove...
Afraid of the Novel August 17, 2023
The following review is part of RealClear Books & Culture's symposium on Joseph Epstein's 'The Novel, Who Needs It?'On the evidence of this slim book defending the novel in our age of its diminished relevance, there are whole libraries full of novels...
Great American Novelist August 10, 2023
“You know, I don’t really talk to that many other novelists,” James McBride told me. “I don’t spend a lot of time with other writers.” It was a statement that explained a lot, while at the same time shooting a pet theory out of the water. If McBride’...
Brandon Taylor is Reinventing the Campus Novel May 24, 2023
“Iowa was a kind of cultural winter,” Brandon Taylor writes in The Late Americans, describing a midwestern college town. “They had all come to this speck of a city in the middle of a middle state in order to study art, to hone themselves and their id...
‘The Guest’ Is a Vacuous Mess May 10, 2023
The American novelist Emma Cline is a golden girl. She’s known for her gorgeous telegraphic style, and for the $2 million advance and three-book contract it brought her, back when she was a 27-year-old graduate of Columbia University’s MFA programme....
Pynchon’s Prophecy March 30, 2023
One of the few photographic traces of the famously reclusive author Thomas Pynchon is a picture taken in 1965 outside of his apartment at 217 33rd Street, Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles County. Outside the front door with a pig-shaped piñata is his fri...
Literary Phenom Flames Out March 24, 2023
From its ponderous title to its inane contents, The World and All That It Holds, by the Bosnian American novelist Aleksandar Hemon, is a novel that manages to be disappointing in every possible way. But to be fair to the author, I have to say this is...
Franzen's Anger March 16, 2023
For nearly thirty years, Jonathan Franzen has been telling the same story: not—or not only—the multigenerational Midwestern saga with its rigid or rudderless parents, its children messily fledging, but another story, about fiction.In 1996, speaking o...
On 'The Shards' January 16, 2023
The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis’s first novel in thirteen years, blends menace and luxury. Framed as the traumatic memory of “Bret,” recalled from the vantage of his adult life, it follows a set of privileged high schoolers across two unholy months. At...
Was Kurt Vonnegut a Nice Man? November 10, 2022
Like Dolly Parton, Alan Bennett, George Michael and Anthony Bourdain, Vonnegut has become simplified into an avatar of kindness, his wrinkles ironed flat by the heat of sainthood. This happened long before his death in 2007 and he was a willing consp...
Our Literary Drought December 11, 2020
In 1955, the year of the founding of National Review, literature in its main branches — poetry, fiction, criticism — was flourishing. In American poetry, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings were still at work. In fiction...
Three on the Life and Works of Robert Stone March 30, 2020
The life of Robert Stone contained virtually all the things one might consider essential to qualifying as a major postwar American novelist: a National Book Award (for “Dog Soldiers,” in 1975), movie adaptations, A-list friendships (Paul Newman, Nick...
Young William Faulkner in the French Quarter March 27, 2020
Spanish moss, rumbling streetcars, honking automobiles, street vendors, artists, prostitutes, nuns, tourists, speakeasies, restaurants, and bars—that was the New Orleans French Quarter in the 1920s, when Sherwood Anderson and his wife, Elizabeth Pral...
