Fiction
Story Stream
The Medical Outlook February 19, 2025
Although I have been writing for publication for more than forty years, it always pleases (and surprises) me when someone writes to tell me that he or she has read something that I have written. It is reassuring to know that I have not been merely se...
It's Always High School February 18, 2025
The writer Elizabeth Ellen earned my admiration in October of 2022 when, as the Deputy Editor of literary journal Hobart Pulp, she defied the then-reigning orthodoxy of cancellations and speech-policing and published an interview containing taboo, fo...
The Everyday Avant-garde February 12, 2025
Generative Fiction: Henry James as a path for Avant-garde literatureThe aesthetics of “Alt Lit” have now defined underground literary culture for almost two decades. From Tao Lin’s early-2010s internet-driven auto-fiction to recent “post-ironic” nove...
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....
The Big Finish February 06, 2025
“The worst is not. So long as we can say ‘This is the worst,’ ” go the lines from King Lear quoted in Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven. Any stories we tell about the end of the world will have to be fictional, since once the real thi...
At the Sauna: Dispatch from Eternity (Age Thirty-Two) February 03, 2025
As a teen, the distance between the present and future was mysterious and unbreachable. Parental appeals to the future didn’t work. “Think of the future,” they said. But I couldn’t. I could picture a red bird. I could picture a lampstand. But the fut...
Sam Altman’s Stargate Is Science Fiction February 03, 2025
Stargate is a staggering power grab.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has spent the past year seeking an absurd amount of computing power to train the company’s AI models — one report says Japanese officials literally laughed at the amount of electricity he dema...
The Truth About Fiction January 21, 2025
In September 2023, Linda Coombs published Colonization and the Wampanoag Story with Penguin Random House, about the Wampanoag people’s contact with Europeans. The book was categorised under ‘children’s nonfiction’. A year later, a citizen committee i...
Pasolini and the Permanent Present January 16, 2025
One of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s remarkable early accomplishments was the long poem that lent its title to his 1961 collection of poetry, La Religione del mio tempo, or “The Religion of My Time.” And while religion was many things to Pasolini, what he wa...
'Landman' Is the Perfect Show for Our Times January 16, 2025
Taylor Sheridan, the most overextended man in television, has done it again. Landman, according to the internal metrics at Paramount+, is the most watched original show the streamer has ever had. (The top five spots are all held by other Sheridan ser...
The New Semantics of the Kafkaesque January 15, 2025
In conversation with a friend who is well versed in neologism, the discussion often returns to Franz Kafka. Trace the roots of any word back far enough and you’ll find historical context largely removed from contemporary meaning, but Franz Kafka and ...
‘Severance’ Is Finally Back January 15, 2025
At 3:04 a.m. on May 24, 2010, Dan Erickson logged on to Facebook and updated his status with nine simple words: “Dear Lost. It was perfect. Thank you. Love, Dan.”Lost had aired its series finale earlier that night, bringing to a close six seasons of ...
How “The Brutalist” Brutalizes History January 15, 2025
I am struggling to recall a film that made me as angry as The Brutalist did. The top-tier contender for Academy Awards Best Picture directed by Brady Corbet and starring Adrien Brody as the fictional modernist architect László Tóth, who survives the ...
The Secret Life of James Dean January 13, 2025
In the spring of 1958, the book publisher Simon & Schuster shocked the New York–media world by erecting on Broadway between 46th and 47th Streets a 40-foot-high billboard with art by Andy Warhol to advertise a new novel. No publisher had ever promote...
30 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2025 January 09, 2025
A new year always brings some uncertainty, and that seems particularly true at the start of 2025. As America grapples with a new (yet familiar) political era, and the larger world faces challenges with few easy solutions, what better way to settle in...
The Joy of Poetry January 09, 2025
In 2003, when results came in for the 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (sppa), Dana Gioia took action. The survey was designed by the National Endowment for the Arts, where Gioia served as chairman from 2003 to 2009; the Census Bureau ...
The Woman-of-Color Nanny Novel January 07, 2025
The young nanny has long captured our collective imagination as a feminine ideal: youthful, vulnerable in a stranger’s home, and professionally obligated to please. She’s invariably beautiful, or at least sexually appealing in her availability, and i...
Are Men’s Reading Habits Truly a National Crisis? January 06, 2025
The question has been hurtling through think pieces, op-eds, and ominous headlines over the past few years: Have American men stopped reading? Specifically, have they stopped reading fiction? And is that why the world is so bad now?...
The Year of Spicy Literary Fiction January 03, 2025
A woman gifted a pear that she proceeds to eat as though it is a lover, her arms dripping, “wet all around her mouth.” A pleasure bot with her libido keyed to its highest setting, driven to lick her owner’s shoes and writhe with unconsummated lust un...
Paul Schrader’s Favorite Works of Fiction December 13, 2024
Paul Schrader, whose latest film, “Oh, Canada,” is based on Russell Banks’s semi-autobiographical novel “Foregone,” is no stranger to literary adaptations....
Kicking an Open Door December 11, 2024
Did the novels of the twentieth century accomplish anything? Edwin Frank, who is known for his love of the genre, is convinced they did. In his stylish, selective survey Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, he focuses on the g...
Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone December 09, 2024
Over the past two decades, literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit. Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women. In 2004, about half the authors on the New York Times fiction best-seller list were women and about half men;...
9 Books We’re Excited to Read in December 2024 December 09, 2024
It’s the last installment of our anticipated reads list for 2024, and we’re ending things with overseas literature from Buenos Aires to Palestine to Namibia to Venezuela, exciting returns from alt-lit icons, and non-fiction that pulls from past poems...
The Novels That Made Us December 06, 2024
If there is any cultural and intellectual institution today that has the sanctity of the old New Yorker, it’s the New York Review Books Classics series, conceived of and edited by Edwin Frank. NYRB Classics rescues out-of-print masterpieces, especial...
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 ...
