Literature

Fiction

A Devotee of Deception

In Domenico Starnone’s The Old Man by the Sea, an elderly writer looks back across a life in which he has always sought distance and control rather than passion.

April 23, 2026 issue

Hermione Lee

‘To Share Is Our Duty’

Two consummate Virginia Woolf scholars have added more than 1,400 letters to the corpus. On show are charm, careful condolence, generosity, candor about her reading and writing, and a belief that “communication is health.”

April 23, 2026 issue

Francine Prose

Blood in the Game

For two novels that address the escalating violence, rampant corruption, and class resentment poisoning our society, Lee Clay Johnson’s Bloodline and Carl Hiaasen’s Fever Beach are also surprisingly funny.

April 23, 2026 issue

Miranda Seymour

Deciphering Dame Muriel

In Electric Spark, Frances Wilson attempts to crack the ingenious codes that were of prime importance in Muriel Spark’s life and writing.

April 9, 2026 issue

Omari Weekes

Possessing the Painful Parts

Tyriek White’s We Are a Haunting traces the lives of Black Brooklynites dealing with the porous boundaries between the past and the present as they forge lives amid the detritus that others have discarded.

April 9, 2026 issue

Ben Lerner

Crowds and Lovers

In his novel G., John Berger shifts between the revolutionary possibilities of mass demonstrations and of erotic encounters, ultimately writing a historical novel about the present.

April 9, 2026 issue

Michael Dirda

Dantès’s Inferno

When I first read The Count of Monte Cristo, it offered something irresistible: the possibility of reinvention. If, against all odds, Edmond Dantès could remake himself, so could I.

April 9, 2026 issue

Cathleen Schine

The Possibility of Humor

In his novel A Fool’s Kabbalah, Steve Stern writes in a manic whirl of disturbing and hilarious images as he follows the great historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem on his journey to gather up the remains of a vanished civilization.

April 9, 2026 issue

Essays by Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith

The Instrumentalist

At the heart of the film Tár is a conductor who cannot see beyond her generation’s field of vision.

January 19, 2023 issue

Zadie Smith

In Defense of Fiction

We have found fiction wanting in myriad ways but rarely paused to wonder, or recall, what we once wanted from it.

October 24, 2019 issue

President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G7 Summit, Krün, Germany, June 2015

Zadie Smith

On Optimism and Despair

If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities.

December 22, 2016 issue

More by Zadie Smith

James Baldwin (1924–1987)

James Baldwin

James Baldwin

A Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis

January 7, 1971 issue

James Baldwin

God’s Country

March 23, 1967 issue

The Latest

Daniel Lefferts

The Hardy Men

Why is a right-wing press reissuing century-old adolescent mystery novels?

April 16, 2026

André Breton, read by Gini Alhadeff

Gini Alhadeff Reads from André Breton’s ‘Nadja’

Episode 8 of Private Life

April 1, 2026

Richard Hell

Richard Hell Reads from Godlike

Episode 6 of Private Life

March 18, 2026

Richard Hell, in conversation with Jarrett Earnest

Richard Hell on Godlike and Poetry as a Way of Life

Episode 5 of Private Life

March 11, 2026

Meghan O’Gieblyn

The Island That Held Them

In David Greig’s novel The Book of I, a monk, a Viking, and a “mead wife” navigate a world torn between paganism and Christianity.

March 26, 2026 issue

Nathan Thrall

‘Dirty Work’

The Israeli writer S. Yizhar’s 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh portrays the violent reality of the Nakba. For decades it was part of the canon of Hebrew literature. That has changed.

March 26, 2026 issue

Aaron Matz

All of Us Yahoos

A new history of satire wants to limit the genre to its political ramifications, but satirists are often interested in the whole person and their capacity for vice.

March 26, 2026 issue

Joy Williams

The Stony Dark Within

Rainer Maria Rilke’s temperament, it could be said, was fragile, ghost-haunted, unironic, unthrifty, reliant, romantic, intermittently animistic, and decidedly non-avant-garde.

February 25, 2026

Edward Mendelson

Deeper Than They Thought

Although Margaret Kennedy has been largely forgotten as a popular writer, in her novels she wielded the most cunning techniques of literary modernism.

March 12, 2026 issue

Colin Grant

If These Walls Could Talk

In A House for Miss Pauline, the Jamaican novelist Diana McCaulay examines her family’s shadowy history by telling the story of a woman who builds her house with the remains of the manor of a former slave plantation.

March 12, 2026 issue