Novelist
Story Stream
Recovering from Heroin and Fiction September 23, 2024
Simone de Beauvoir wrote that novels are compelling to the degree that the characters in them actually seem free. Novels in which the reader has a sense that the characters have agency, make decisions, and aren’t mere instantiations of ideologies or ...
The Sally Rooney Effect September 20, 2024
On Tuesday, Sally Rooney will publish her fourth novel, Intermezzo, with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Each Rooney novel since her 2017 debut, Conversations with Friends, has caused a frenzy in the literary world. Normal People (2018) put her on the lit...
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,...
Review: 'Annihilation' by Michel Houellebecq September 16, 2024
French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s last novel, 2019’s Serotonin, practically dared the reader to abandon it. Bitter, bigoted narrator Florent-Claude Labrouste sprayed venom in all directions, but reserved the worst for his near-silent, spectacularl...
Richard Powers on What We Do to the Earth September 13, 2024
“Can you smell the negative ions?”The novelist Richard Powers and I were sitting on the banks of a river in the Great Smoky Mountains, and I could scarcely hear him above the water crashing against the rocks. The sound was both violent and serene, li...
The Great American Malaise September 11, 2024
An observation. There are few interesting and new political ideas, and few innovative works of imaginative literature. Politics and literature are both on a decline; political and literary genius are increasingly rare. American politics and literatur...
Language and Leonard Michaels September 05, 2024
All that great writing, trapped in mediocre books! —Elif BatumanCatachresis leads to anthropophagy. —David Bentley HartOrdinary people have a right to feel harassed when their language is criticized. We have grammar school for that kind of thing afte...
AI Is Coming for the Amateur Novelists. That’s Fine. September 05, 2024
With a name that sounds like something a parent would slowly mouth to their infant, NaNoWriMo is an annual “challenge” in which many thousands of seemingly well-adjusted people decide to write a novel in a month. “Do I need something special to write...
Danzy Senna Is Amused by Your Mixed Feelings September 04, 2024
The sad music snuck up on us, stealing into the conversation just as we turned to the future of biracial identity. “We’re under deep suspicion at the moment,” Danzy Senna confided over lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where we’d settled down at a bo...
Is a Writer a Kind of Spy? September 03, 2024
Rachel Kushner had warned me that there might be snakes and one very mean turkey on the farm. There would also be mud; she recommended rubber boots. And, as far as she remembered, there was no cell service.The property in Delaware County, N.Y., belon...
Monstrous Things September 03, 2024
It’s hard for a novelist to make a double axe-murderer sympathetic, especially when his victims are an old woman and her mentally disabled half-sister. In addition to which, this murderer is a remorseless antisemite who rationalises his motives and c...
Work-Life Imbalance September 02, 2024
For most of her career, the novelist Danzy Senna has maintained a cagey relationship to the politics of representation. Her debut novel, Caucasia—a sweeping bildungsroman about a mixed-race girl teetering on the color line—thrust her into the spotlig...
Another Prophecy Fulfilled September 02, 2024
When modernity itself seems to be tearing apart at the seams, best to turn to J. G. Ballard.The English novelist, who died in 2009, retains his prophetic edge; while the West has yet to become an actual Orwellian nightmare—the elections still free an...
Painting the Revolution June 03, 2024
In 1853, British novelist William Makepeace Thackeray toured the U.S. Capitol with Senator Charles Sumner. Thackeray, who illustrated his own novels with sketches, was impressed by the Rotunda and its four wall-size paintings of scenes of the America...
A Conversation with Cally Fiedorek June 03, 2024
Last year, I had the pleasure of offering a blurb for Atta Boy, Cally Fiedorek’s debut novel. I was struck, right away, by her ability to so seamlessly navigate across the social strata of New York City. This is a vanishing art in the world of litera...
Teddy Wayne Knows What Makes the World Go Round May 29, 2024
“You never know about the people pulling the actual strings of life in America,” author Teddy Wayne tells Esquire, “because they’re completely out of sight.”In Wayne’s newest novel, The Winner, these unseen kingmakers come into stark close-up—and the...
Influence and Imitation in Referential Fiction May 29, 2024
I recently saw The Wife of Willesden, the first play by the novelist Zadie Smith. As I walked through the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I noticed the stage had been transformed into a bar. Some members of the audience even seemed to be seated there to f...
Garth Risk Hallberg Takes On the Life-and-Times Novel May 28, 2024
The Great American Novel is a long-dead cultural aspiration, extinguished by a healthy realization that the country is too big and too varied to generate any singular, definitive volume. American novelists tend, in our time, to earn public recognitio...
Claire Messud’s Remarkable Experiment in Historical Fiction May 23, 2024
Opposite the copyright page in Claire Messud’s newest book, This Strange Eventful History, is a note in small, faint type. It begins: “Although this novel was inspired by the author’s family history, this is a work of fiction and the usual rules appl...
The Many Notes of Anthony Burgess May 21, 2024
Anthony Burgess wrote 2,000 words a day. Finished copy, mind you, not drafts. This would have put him in the middleweight division of the 19th century, when heavy hitters like Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac set the pace. Burgess was in many way...
Words and Weapons May 21, 2024
Sir Salman Rushdie is first and foremost a novelist, a creator of fiction, an artist. He is brilliant at it and, deservedly, much decorated. His fifteen published novels have been translated into dozens of languages, won the world’s most glittering l...
Kevin Kwan Almost Didn’t Finish This Book May 21, 2024
“My ability to write is gone,” Kevin Kwan told his publishing team at Penguin Random House in 2020. “I’m sorry. I lost whatever gift I had. I need to go to cobbler school and learn how to make shoes.”Kwan is the author of Crazy Rich Asians, which was...
The Renegade’s Tale May 17, 2024
“I’m the great sage on top of the mountain,” Margaret Atwood says with a smile, on a video call from her home in Toronto. “If you’ve lived to a certain age people think you know something because they haven’t got there yet.”At 84, most writers could ...
Analyst or Moralist? May 16, 2024
“There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book,” Oscar Wilde wrote in the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, “books are well written or badly written, that is all.” Wilde was correct. Moral considerations should be suspended when ev...
The Cult of Nonfiction May 16, 2024
What, other than literary fiction, is occupying the young male today? I posited, among other attractions, online gambling and video gaming. This drew strong reactions, particularly from gamers who suggested almost as many women are playing today. Fai...
