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Robert Caro’s Abandoned Novel April 11, 2025
Robert Caro’s fame rests on his epic works of historical nonfiction—The Power Broker, his disposition of urban planner Robert Moses, and his four-volume-and-counting biography of Lyndon B. Johnson—but to succeed in writing history, he has said, “the ...
Sigrid Nunez on and off the Big Screen April 10, 2025
Introducing his new film, The Room Next Door, before its screening at the New York Film Festival, Pedro Almodóvar took a moment to express his gratitude to Sigrid Nunez, the author of the novel What Are You Going Through, on which the film is based. ...
Reservation Politics April 10, 2025
EARLY ON IN Jon Hickey’s Big Chief (2025), Mitch, the novel’s antihero, visits Waabizh, a medicine man whom his mentor, Joe Beck, respects and trusts. During their conversation, Waabizh refers to Mitch by his Anishinaabemowin name, Mishkigabo—a name ...
Living in Gatsby’s World April 10, 2025
The study hall in my high school was a large open area with beige desks lined in a row. Fluorescent lights dumbly hummed over the linoleum floors and trapped me in between. I mostly put my head on the desk, but occasionally, I’d read for pleasure, an...
How Gatsby Deceived America April 10, 2025
It is almost too symmetrical. On the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby, it is Elon Musk, titanic car manufacturer and destroyer of worlds, who defines the spirit of a new America. The American car, emblem of power, speed and so...
On My Grandfather’s Novel April 09, 2025
I never met my grandparents: Scott died young, in 1940 at the age of forty-four. I was born in 1948. Zelda wrote my mother from Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, “I long to see the baby,” but she perished in a fire a couple of months la...
The Prehistoric Psychopath April 07, 2025
We are naturally a highly violent species with a thin veneer of civilization that masks a brutal proclivity for violence – or so many people think. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes said that human life without government is ‘solitary, poore,...
On Haley Mlotek’s 'No Fault' April 07, 2025
First came the marriage plot; then came the commercial divorce memoir, an epiphanic form relishing little pleasures and self-discovery afforded by international travel.Both genres were new once. Now, they each have their practitioners, who might upho...
One Hundred Years of Gatsby April 07, 2025
F.Scott Fitzgerald’s final royalty check was for $13.13, making him the recipient of a double dose of bad luck. By 1940, the novel he thought to be his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, was very nearly out of print, and the woman he regarded as the love...
Ross Douthat’s Serious Fantasy April 04, 2025
What does it take to get a fantasy novel published these days, if not a famous name and a great manuscript? Judging by The Falcon’s Children, a high epic fantasy by conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, it seems the answer is a gimmick ...
An Exile in Time and Space April 04, 2025
The addresses collected in We Have Ceased to See the Purpose: Essential Speeches of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were written by a man on the run. The earliest is his Nobel Prize lecture, printed in 1972 after he sent it to Stockholm in place of a live app...
The Devil and Mary Gaitskill April 03, 2025
Among the dozens of stories Mary Gaitskill has published since her 1988 debut Bad Behavior, only one — “Secretary,” a detached BDSM narrative from that collection — has been loosely adapted for the screen. On its face, this fact is not entirely surpr...
Searching for Bigger April 02, 2025
A century ago, Claude McKay published Home to Harlem, a novel narrating Black working-class experiences in the eponymous Black Mecca in the aftermath of the First World War. Home to Harlem is considered to be one of the first successful Black novels ...
Shūsaku Endō, Christianity, and Japan April 02, 2025
Is Christianity an exclusively Western faith? In his most famous novel Silence, published in 1966 and adapted by Martin Scorsese in 2016, Japanese Catholic writer Shūsaku Endō (1932-1996) follows the stories of seventeenth century Jesuit missionaries...
W.G. Sebald and the Politics of Melancholy April 01, 2025
W.G. Sebald’s premature death from a heart attack, in December 2001, at 57—months after the publication of his novel Austerlitz propelled him to the height of his literary fame—has left his readers wanting more, and ever since, his publishers have in...
Loos Woman April 01, 2025
Acentury ago, a slender novel captivated casual readers and literary giants alike with its insightful skewering of Jazz Age consumerism and the American lust for class, wealth, sex, social acceptance, and, above all, a piece of the American Dream.Edi...
The Poet October 09, 2024
I've had my galley of Michel Houellebecq's Annihilation for at least four months now; I've been able to stare at the tentative publication date of 10-8-24, thinking about when I'm going to get around to writing this review.There's something in Houell...
Blue Walls Falling Down October 09, 2024
An Excerpt from Blue Walls Falling Down: A NovelStella Tęsknota was ready to marry Blake Yourrick, the troubled if earnest protagonist of Infinite Regress. In this stand-alone novel (and loose sequel), set after Blake abruptly—and inexplicably—breaks...
The Faith of Michel Houellebecq October 09, 2024
For the miserable loners who populate Michel Houellebecq’s novels, there is no refuge from the modern world’s awfulness—“no Israel,” as one of them says. Over three decades, the French novelist has tallied the grim costs of “l’extension du domaine de...
Clan of the Cave Bore October 09, 2024
Creation Lake is a novel that wants to be many contradictory things to many people all at the same time: It is a spy novel and a satire of a spy novel; a retro “novel of ideas” in a mid-20th-century style that’s also an absurdist postmodern novel of ...
France’s Most Controversial Novelist October 09, 2024
Michel Houellebecq — arguably the most important French writer of the past quarter-century — was perched on the seat of his chair like a bird. We were sitting in his dim Paris apartment in August, a spectacularly beautiful day visible through his cur...
Author & Aviator October 08, 2024
In the last days of the 1960s, James Salter, a pilot who had left the US Air Force to try to make it as a writer, was living in Aspen, subsisting on piecemeal writing gigs: screenplays, stories, essays, profiles. As a celebrity interviewer for People...
On Unaffected Pleasure October 08, 2024
I like writing advice. For two or three years now, I have even kept a running list of storytelling principles in a document on my phone: “Exposition creates drama”; “Tell one story well rather than several less well”; “If the end isn’t working, the p...
Sally Rooney’s Millennials Grow Up October 07, 2024
Some of Sally Rooney’s best writing is about power in relationships: who has it and who doesn’t, who wishes they had it, and who has it but doesn’t know they do. Early on in Intermezzo, her fourth novel, she restages a scenario that will be familiar ...
Does Anyone Really Know You? October 03, 2024
At the end of “Anna Karenina,” Konstantin Levin, the less famous of the novel’s two main protagonists, muses on his isolation amid a loving family. Unlike Anna, he has a happy marriage. His wife, Kitty, and son, Mitya, bring him great joy, and he fee...
