Novels
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4 New Detective Novels Worth Investigating February 10, 2025
Our critic on the month’s most notable releases....
Classic Romance Novels: A Starter Pack February 07, 2025
Every now and again some starry-eyed optimist tries to craft an all-time best-of romance canon, and the gods laugh and make popcorn for the ensuing discourse fiasco. Romance is a slippery genre — in so many ways — and frequently there’s a seismic shi...
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...
Vigdis Hjorth and the Novel of Ugly Love February 05, 2025
The Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth is skeptical of conclusions. She knows that readers always know that the end of the story, happy or tragic, is not quite like life: There are always too many loose ends, continuations. We accept that a narrative i...
Why Patrick Bateman Endures February 04, 2025
It’s been 25 years since American Psycho slunk its way on to movie screens. Yet the film, starring Christian Bale as yuppie serial killer Patrick Bateman, has never quite managed to die.The satirical horror film, directed by filmmaker Mary Harron and...
An Unusual Cultural Artifact of Religious Revival February 04, 2025
Religiosity in America, measured in denominational affiliation and church attendance, has never been lower. Over the past decades, a growing culture of atheism (and non-denominationalism) has spread across the country and permeated into our art, trad...
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 Secret Inspiration for Hemingway’s Greatest Novel January 06, 2025
You don’t expect to find a hidden message in a book you first read when you were a teenager. Not when it’s part of the canon, analyzed for decades, with critical opinion on it a settled matter. But when I was asked to write an introduction to a new V...
An Outrageous Novel About U.S. Politics January 02, 2025
It was a congressional aide, of all people, who clued me in to “The Public Burning,” Robert Coover’s magnificent novel about American politics, which is even more relevant today than when first published, to puzzlement and acclaim, in 1977. We were e...
Daniel Defoe’s Journeys of the Mind January 01, 2025
In his novels, Daniel Defoe’s eponymous protagonists travel far and wide and then yearn for a return to English shores. Robinson Crusoe hopes to be rescued from his ‘Island of Despair’. Moll Flanders craves a change of scene when married life in Virg...
England’s Real-Life Quietus December 11, 2024
Two weeks ago, the British House of Commons voted in favor of a bill that, according to the BBC, “would allow terminally ill adults expected to die within six months to seek help to end their own life.” The final vote was 330 to 275.This news immedia...
A Business Doing Pleasure with You December 11, 2024
There are nefarious forces at work in the sphere of taste. Dislike and possibly judgment itself have been outlawed. Phalanxes of stans stand ready to dox critics and unbelievers. Haters are held at post-point until they recite, and believe, that arti...
Why the Novel Matters December 11, 2024
“Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.” A Room with a View by EM......
The Carpetbagger Who Saw Texas’s Future December 11, 2024
When Edna Ferber’s Giant was published in 1952, Texans were not pleased. Ferber’s sweeping novel about cattle, oil, and the winds of change brought a reform-minded Virginia woman, Leslie Benedict, to a Texas ranch, where she has the temerity to sugge...
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...
Is Literature Losing Its Audience Because of Politics? December 09, 2024
Americans are bored of reading. A 2021 Gallup poll found that the average American now reads 12.6 books per year, down from 18.5 in the late 1990s. The contrast is even starker in college-educated readers, whose yearly book quota has dropped to 14.6 ...
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;...
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 ...
On Taking Things Slow December 05, 2024
I would describe your book, The Champ Is Here, as a series of loosely linked anecdotes about life in a small town. I’m curious about how you conceptualize it—do you see it as a novel, prose poetry, a short story collection? Do those labels even matte...
On Hannah Regel’s “The Last Sane Woman” December 04, 2024
In an interview with Montez Press, Hannah Regel recommends Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina. Published two years before Bachmann’s death in 1971, Malina was to be the first entry in her Todesarten cycle, meaning “Death Styles.” Set in post-war Austri...
On Tony Tulathimutte’s 'Rejection' December 04, 2024
In Tony Tulathimutte’s debut novel, Private Citizens, Will, a computer programmer, wonders “whether masturbating to porn was an art form: not as ‘erotica’ or performance art, but as solitary pursuit of the sublime.” Surely, he thinks, “someone must h...
A Conversation with Emmalea Russo December 03, 2024
Poet and novelist Emmalea Russo exists on my Instagram as a wild-haired, tattooed practitioner of the occult who sometimes wears a party dress, sometimes carries a pitchfork, and lives in the green world outside our urban spaces. In the past year, sh...
The Decline and Fall of the Campus Novel December 02, 2024
Can it really be half a century since the publication of Porterhouse Blue? Tom Sharpe’s classic, scabrous satire on Oxbridge life was a novel so trenchant that it moulded – and arguably redefined – how the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, those ...
Alan Hollinghurst’s English Underground December 02, 2024
Given his interest in reconjuring lost Englands, it is fitting that Alan Hollinghurst passes his days alongside one of its best-preserved anachronisms. Hollinghurst’s home abuts Hampstead Heath, the great grassy eruption that bestrides north London, ...
