Literary Fiction
Story Stream
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...
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...
Publishers Have Killed Lit Fiction December 20, 2024
Literary fiction is dead. Or, so we’ve been told. Perhaps we can agree it lies bleeding.It’s convenient to assume that readers are to blame for killing literary fiction, and publishers have abandoned it because book-buyers are stupid, have bad taste,...
Pity the Short Story Writer December 16, 2024
In my youth, I submitted many short stories to literary magazines, journals, and websites. A few were accepted, and that was thrilling. There was the immediate high of seeing your name somewhere else—that undeniable ego-gratification—and the greater ...
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;...
How to Read Like a Man September 18, 2024
A strange and telling bit of literary trivia is that two of the greatest English-language novelists of the last half-century — Cormac McCarthy and Don Delillo — were not big readers when they were boys. Both took up reading as young men, and, indeed,...
Glory Days August 28, 2024
Simon Rich’s first book, Ant Farm, was published in April 2007, while Rich was still a senior in college. “Some of the pieces in that book date back to high school. I think the earliest one in that book is ‘Math Problems,’ which was about a teacher w...
8 Questions for Andrew Boryga August 28, 2024
Andrew Boryga is a Bronx, New York born and raised writer who now lives in sunny Miami, Florida with his wife, two little kids, and cute dog. His debut novel Victim (Doubleday March 2024), a satire of virtue signalling and tear-jerking trauma plots, ...
The Best Literary Fiction Books of 2024, So Far August 26, 2024
There are few pleasures—or responsibilities—I appreciate as much as the chance to survey a whole year’s worth of books. Hundreds of thousands (or millions, depending on what and how you’re counting) of titles are published each year: Giving each the ...
Do We Really Want More Male Vulnerability in Fiction? July 18, 2024
Last week, journalist Katie Tobin published a piece in Esquire called “Where is all the sad boy literature,” which I read with great interest. Although I don’t really know what the hell “sad boy” literature is, and didn’t really get a better sense of...
Where Is All the Sad Boy Literature? July 11, 2024
Lately, it seems like literary fiction has been unable to escape the scourge of “sad girl literature.” Though the genre has deep roots, it garnered widespread popularity during the pandemic, when it came to encapsulate the malaise of millennial and G...
Fitzcarraldo Editions Makes Challenging Literature Chic July 02, 2024
For nearly a year after Jennifer Croft, a translator, sent a submission to Jacques Testard, a publisher in London, in the summer of 2015, the manuscript languished unread. Testard had launched Fitzcarraldo Editions the previous year, with the goal of...
Literary Fiction's 'Uptown Problem' Problem February 05, 2024
A friend of mine used to remark that the things I complained about were “uptown problems.” After two suicide attempts, he took a broader view than most. So, while sympathetic to my concerns, he occasionally reminded me that my life—both of our lives—...
