THE UNCANNY fertility and invention displayed by the writing of Muriel Spark has been a consistent source of awed bemusement. Gabriel Josipovici, an experimental writer quick to identify Spark as a rare British predecessor, called her novels—she published twenty-two in all—“a joy to read and a nightmare to talk about.” Renata Adler, in the Spark […]
DESPITE HER REPUTATION as a long-winded writer, Gertrude Stein had a talent for pithiness. Of Oakland, the town where she grew up, she famously remarked: “There is no there, there.” Of one of her literary nemeses, Ezra Pound: “A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if not, not.” Of the younger American […]
JORDAN CASTRO FIRST CAME across my radar in 2011 when he live streamed himself “earnestly” attempting to detach his penis from his body with his bare hands. At the time, Castro was an eighteen-year-old poet and contributor to HTMLGiant, the blog/discussion board where the alt-lit scene bloomed. I remember watching through cracked fingers, unsure if […]
Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures (Riverhead, $29)—his fourth book of fiction—is an ambitious departure from his previous work. The novel takes up timely and fraught questions of representation within a culture industry hostile to idiosyncratic depictions of Black life that do not adhere to predictable narratives. At turns satirical and humane, the novel follows the romantic […]
THE NIGHT AFTER I finished reading The Möbius Book, I woke up from a terrible dream. In this dream I had been shrunk back to twenty-three years old, back to a uniquely terrible relationship with a man. He began to argue with me, this man, on account of the fact that he no longer enjoyed […]
WHEN LEIF RANDT’S novel Schimmernder Dunst über Coby County came out in 2011, it was unique in the German literary world. Randt was one of the few German authors writing what is now commonly called speculative fiction—not hard sci-fi but not realism, either—and in Berlin, where I lived at the time, it generated enough buzz […]
ONCE, AS A CHILD, I had visions. This took place in a children’s hospital decorated with murals of sea creatures. During the several hours I was in surgery, they had come alive. An octopus crawled along the plaster. A sea dragon undulated. I might have been frightened, except the ocean in the walls simply confirmed […]
At once a domestic novel and a spy thriller, Susan Choi’s Flashlight (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30) spans the second half of the twentieth century, at least, and takes us to Japan, North Korea, and the United States. When Anne and Serk, the couple at the center of the book, meet in the mid 1960s, […]
SEBASTIAN CASTILLO, THE AUTHOR of Fresh, Green Life, is also the name of the book’s narrator. A reader, reasonably, might start by thinking about autofiction as an animating principle, but that’s not really Castillo’s concern in this brief novel, nor was it the focus of his last, a hybrid of fiction and drama called SALMON […]
In a 1996 interview with The Paris Review, the reporter and novelist John Gregory Dunne was asked why he chose to classify his 1974 book, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, as fiction as opposed to journalism. The book recounts six months Dunne spent alone in Vegas, taking a break from his marriage. Dunne, […]
IN 1946 THE AUSTRIAN WRITER Marlen Haushofer began publishing fairy tales and short stories in newspapers and small magazines. Her prewar writings—stories, poems, chapters of novels—had all been lost, and during the war she wrote “not a single line.” The new stories were a pragmatic measure: they were written to be published, to supplement the […]
OCEAN VUONG’S 2016 DEBUT POETRY COLLECTION, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, received a rave review from Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times Book Review, then the most important tastemaker in contemporary American literature. Rare enough for any book of poetry to receive critical attention from the NYTBR, but a debut collection? It was a […]
AN OVERPOWERED REBEL casts his eyes up in terror at the warrior ripping him away from his grieving mother. Survivors on a corpse-covered raft at sea, dispatched by a vicious colonial government and abandoned by their superiors, stretch desperate hands toward the horizon, where a rescue may or may not be approaching. A peasant rebellion […]
A BARELY PERCEPTIBLE WHIFF OF CONTEMPT laces Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection. This slim, elegant novel was originally published in Italian as Le Perfezioni in 2022—Sophie Hughes’s sleek English translation was released by New York Review Books earlier this year. As the story unfolds the reader at first suspects and then finally finds herself praying that Latronico […]
YOU GOT got into my dreams and changed them into fantasies— The stupor between erotic slapstick and stoic mortification that should subsume anyone sentient after reading the inconclusive, concussive epilogue of Nettie Jones’s 1984 novel Fish Tales tempts you to return, puzzled and undone, to page one, to see if you overlooked the exact pivot […]
THE MAIN CHARACTERS of Katie Kitamura’s fiction are marginalized figures—middling middlemen—who work as translators or executors of other people’s plans. Their work often takes them far away from home, where much, as the saying goes, can get lost in translation. Her 2017 novel A Separation opens with its narrator on her way to Greece to […]
IT’S NEVER BEEN A GOOD TIME to be anything other than a white cis male in this country. From there, we might debate which identities and preferences are the most persecuted but can probably agree that now is an especially terrible time for anything that’s not the muscled, racist, and American brand of, say, Joe […]
I’VE BEEN WAITING TWENTY YEARS for this book. First published in 1982 by The Figures, a small press dedicated to experimental writing, Stephen Rodefer’s Four Lectures soon went out of print and entered legend. “Everyone’s favorite six-hundred-dollar book of poetry,” a wag at the Poetry Foundation dubbed it in 2014. Xeroxed copies were passed around […]
IN HER RECENT BOOK WAVE OF BLOOD, Ariana Reines states the obvious: “It’s a big mistake to kill someone, one person, one person.” I pause on the word “mistake” there. An odd word: pared down, it means “to badly seize,” to reach out and wrap your fingers around a reality that is incorrect. It describes […]
AMERICA IS A LAND OF BEGINNINGS, impatient, virginal, suspicious of foreplay. Sales are clinched on first impressions; books judged by covers; presidents, on their first one hundred days. The critic, novelist, and short story writer Lynne Tillman is an author who refreshingly resists our national logic of instant gratification. What might initially seem like a […]
