How Much Juice Can One Writer Squeeze Out of Male Ugliness? Joshua Ferris’s The Dinner Party is a parade of jerks who march by one by one.
How Good Is Granta ’s List of the Best Young American Novelists? All hail the new Best Young Americans! They’ll never be young again.
In Priestdaddy , Patricia Lockwood Goes Home to a House ‘Made for Screaming’ The memoir is part origin story, part narrative of the Twitter-poet-goddess’s time in the wilderness.
What Happens When Critics Grow Up, and Look Back Memoirists Daphne Merkin and Lee Siegel built their lives around books. Why?
The Lives, and Fictions, of Angela Carter Open The Bloody Chamber and you know right away you’re reading a masterpiece.
Remembering New York Review of Books Founder Robert Silvers A magazine creates its own future by constantly setting an example for the next generation to follow, and Silvers devoted his life to it.
When Joan Didion Visited the South in 1970 Failure is part of the origin myth of New Journalism.
Is Apathy the Key to J.M. Coetzee? It’s an astonishing idea—apathy as a source of, not an obstacle to, seriousness.
Ottessa Moshfegh’s Book Homesick for Another World Revels in Flawed Characters Her short-story collection Homesick for Another World draws you in by highlighting humankind’s grotesqueness.
George Saunders’s New Novel — His First — Is Very, Very Weird It’s narrated by a gaggle of ghosts speaking to us from the Tibetan Buddhist limbo.
the obama years
Jan. 11, 2017
Considering the Novel in the Age of Obama What the standout fiction of the last eight years can tell us about an art form, and a country, in flux.
What’s the Line Between Criticism and the Novel? What happens to criticism when it’s placed within a work of fiction?
year in culture 2016
Dec. 7, 2016
The 10 Best Books of 2016 No. 1: The Underground Railroad .
Michael Chabon’s OSS Fantasia ‘Memoir’ In Moonglow , Chabon goes for the shapelessness of the real.
Zadie Smith’s Swing Time : What Is Fame For? Smith has responded to it by becoming a shape-shifter, a chameleon of the varieties of seriousness.
Who Nominates Writers for the Nobel Prize? Previous Nobelists (among a few other people).
What Can We Possibly Learn About Elena Ferrante? The main effect of Gatti’s report is to ruin the fun.
Book Review: Alexandra Kleeman’s Intimations She has a gothic imagination and a wit keen to the absurdities of American culture — particularly its dietary vices and media horror shows.
If This Fetus Could Talk: McEwan’s Drab Nutshell His glum prose may make the author of Atonement the perfect English writer.
fall preview 2016
Aug. 24, 2016
Here I Am : Jonathan Safran Foer Tries to Grow UpThe result is something like a Philip Roth novel in the style of a Hallmark card.
how to plot a novel
Aug. 9, 2016
Is It Story That Makes Us Read? Plots: the who, what, and where — but maybe not why — of literature. Plus, the history of plot and literature’s very worst endings.
book review
July 27, 2016
Jay McInerney’s Yuppie Trilogy Comes to a Close The third volume recapitulates the strongest and weakest aspects of Brightness Falls and The Good Life .
When Will Helen DeWitt Be Recognized As One of the Great American Novelists? A flood of bad luck has kept her debut The Last Samurai out of print. Will a new edition finally change things?
When Will Helen DeWitt Be Recognized As One of the Great American Novelists? A flood of bad luck has kept her debut The Last Samurai out of print. Will a new edition finally change things?
best of 2016
June 29, 2016
The Best Books of 2016 (So Far) Including titles by Emma Cline, Don DeLillo, and Helen Oyeyemi.
prolificity
June 28, 2016
A Complete Guide to Entertainment’s Busiest Creators The methods, meaning, and occasional madness of the creatively super-productive.
Homegoing: Yaa Gyasi’s Rich, Epic Slave-Trade Debut Homegoing repeatedly enacts one of the the novel’s classic missions.
Could We Just Lose the Adverb (Already)? A part of speech with all of these functions can’t possibly do all of them well.
The Genius of Don DeLillo’s Post-Underworld Work In his new novel Zero K, the 79-year-old has built a temple to house all his ghosts.
In Defense of Pretentiousness Everyone has things that set them off, and whatever we dislike we often just choose to call pretentious.
Will the Brussels Attacks Tip the Brexit Scales? Probably not, since the referendum may have more to do with horse meat than with terrorism.
book review
Mar. 18, 2016
Book Review: What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours The wunderkind author is a prodigious and idiosyncratic talent finding her form in public.
Alex Abramovich Among the Thugs Bullies is a biker memoir, but it’s not a heartwarming tale of self-discovery via leather and chrome.
Dana Spiotta’s Universe of Second Selves Innocents and Others is an asymmetrical novel told in fragments; frustrating readerly expectations is one of Spiotta’s intentions.
The First Great Millennial Novel Social novelists who place limits on their internet access now do so at their own peril.
On Criticism: My Road Trip With A.O. Scott I arrived at his house in Prospect–Lefferts Gardens around 8:15, and we set out in his blue Subaru.
O.J.’s ‘Exact Opposite of Classic,’ If I Did It Revisiting the most deliciously sleazy publishing story of the 21st century.
book review
Jan. 27, 2016
Diane Williams: Avant-Garde Master of Miniature Fiction It’s hard to summarize any of her stories, and it may be beside the point.
Garth Greenwell’s Exquisite, Humorless New Novel I’ve rarely come upon a book, like this one, about which it can be said that humorlessness is not a defect but an aesthetic necessity.
Elizabeth Strout’s Not-at-All-Subtle New Novel It’s impossible not to feel some sympathy for the narrator of Elizabeth Strout’s new novel My Name Is Lucy Barton .
Elliott Chaze’s Black Wings Has My Angel Is a Perfect Crime Novel Coming to the book 60 years after it first appeared, you’ll find yourself wondering why it never got made into a movie.
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