In Alexandra Tanner’s ‘Worry,’ Illness Is the Status Quo
In a novel where sisterhood entails constant conflict, illness provides an unexpected emotional salve.
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At Long Last, a Translation Worthy of ‘Pedro Páramo’
The latest translation of 'Pedro Páramo' is a mystifying work, in the dual sense that it is confounding and that its language possesses an almost mystical quality.
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The Collaborative Alchemy of W.G. Sebald’s Photographs
By rephotographing the material Sebald brought to him, Michael Brandon-Jones played a critical role in helping the writer achieve a tonal consistency between text and image.
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Kelly Link’s Romantic Imagination
Though Link’s stories often keep closer bedfellows with Karen Russell and Aimee Bender, her novel is pulpier and more bathetic, in some ways a piece of straight fantasy.
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The Everyday Horror of ‘Other Minds and Other Stories’
In someone else’s hands, these stories might be little more than typeset urban legends, the stuff of 2000s-era AOL email chains, but Sims renders them as something both terrifying and mesmerizing.
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The Violent Truths of ‘Brutalities’
The impulse to simplify the complicated nature of touch, argues Margo Steines, is not just an intellectual but an ethical failure.
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The Truthful Distortions of ‘The MANIAC’
'The MANIAC' is a kind of triptych, presenting us with the conception, painful birth, and exponential growth of the digital computer and its own disquieting offspring, artificial intelligence.
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The Visionary Memoirs of Péter Nádas
'Shimmering Details' is a delicate fusion, supplementing the high-modernist realism of Proust and Musil with an expressionist’s commitment to the distortions generated by strong feeling.
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Play and Rules: On Megan Fernandes and the Poetics of Kink
The poems of 'I Do Everything I’m Told' pursue an ever more perfect mode of submission.
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The Searing Clarity of Hilary Mantel
Mantel the essayist was eager for ideas, light on her feet, yet sharp as a raptor.
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Éric Vuillard Is Rewriting the Writing of History
Vuillard doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that his quest for murky truths sometimes forces him to speculate.
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Alissa Hattman’s ‘Sift’ Is a Post-Apocalyptic Prophecy
'Sift' is a remarkable entry in the rich climate-change canon that already exists within the genre of speculative fiction.
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Marie Darrieussecq Plumbs the Depths of ‘Sleepless’ Nights
'Sleepless' might be one of the few original interventions on the topic of insomnia in the past 15 years.
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In Louisa Hall’s ‘Reproduction,’ Motherhood Is Otherworldy
For Hall, the trouble is not that writers can’t find the words to describe their reproductive experiences but that their stories will always be inadequate.
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‘Mobility’ Is a New Kind of Climate-Change Novel
As its polyvalent title suggests, Mobility is both a classically-proportioned novel of social climbing and a harsh interrogation of the logic of our petroleum society.
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‘Oh God, The Sun Goes’ Is Strange, Surreal, and Utterly Sincere
Tremendously weird stuff. It’s wonderful.
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The Orthodoxy of Paradox
In 'The Rigor of Angels,' William Eggington posits that paradoxes are inextricable from knowledge.
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