Women and Other Art Objects
Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, in many ways, is about men talking and making art, and about the ways that women experience men’s art, or become the object of it.
Winter 2026
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What’s Left of Macondo?
Shaped by Latin America’s uneven and wildly unequal incorporation into the global market, Gabriel García Márquez’s literary project retains an eerie sense of foreboding today.
Cli-Fi: Birth of a Genre
Perhaps climate change had once seemed too large-scale, or too abstract, for the minutely human landscape of fiction. But the threat seems to have become too pressing to ignore, and less abstract, thanks to a nonstop succession of mega-storms and record-shattering temperatures. Several new novels make climate change central to their plot and setting, appropriating time-honored narratives to accord with our new knowledge and fears.
Of Loopholes and Black Holes
Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularity is a vindication of the novel as a medium that allows time and space to serious considerations about how we organize our society and how we organize our lives. In the past thirty years our art has grown less serious and our politics more cruel. It has taken a novel of the artistic ambition and moral seriousness of A Naked Singularity to show us why this is no coincidence at all.
Post-Hysterics: Zadie Smith and the Fiction of Austerity
For Zadie Smith, the time had come for the radicalism of experiment and the realism of political economy—for a new social realism that was capable of capturing both the mechanics and experience of today’s growing inequality.
The Plutocratic Imagination
Books discussed in this essay: A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, Knopf, 2010, 288 pp. A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s, 2012, 328 pp. Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris, Little, …
The Credit Crisis and the Novel 
The Privileges by Jonathan Dee Random House, 2010, 272 pp., $25 AFTER THE fall of 2008, when the American economy revealed itself to have been a particularly elaborate house of cards, after the astonishment and the rage and the losses …
Literature and the Vietnam War
A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo 1977, 346 pp. Bombingham by Anthony Grooms 2001, 320 pp. Dispatches by Michael Herr 1968, 260 pp. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson 2007, 702 pp. War Story Jim Morris 1979, 342 pp. …
Prisoner of Privilege
A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster by Wendy Moffat Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010, 386pp., $30 Concerning E.M. Forster by Frank Kermode Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009, 170pp., $24 In 1953, when the first issue of …
Orhan Pamuk and Modernist Liberalism
In Snow, and in all his best writing, Pamuk creates a drama of modern life in the process of moving toward radical polarization.
The Ambivalence Artist
On the politics and novels of J.M. Coetzee
Dystopia and the End of Politics
In retrospect, the nineties can seem an anomalous decade, the only one since the Second World War when technological civilization did not appear particularly bent on self-destruction. Of course, not everyone greeted the end of the cold war as the …
The Breakthrough: Feminism and Literary Criticism
How do we know when something starts or when a new phenomenon becomes a major trend? We don’t have a “big bang” theory for the “second wave” of the women’s movement. The common wisdom has been that it began when …
Memory as Homeland
On George Konrád’s A Guest in My Own Country and The City Builder.
Societies of Mutual Isolation
Blindness by José Saramago, translated by Giovanni Pontiero Harcourt Brace, 1998 293 pp $22 All the Names by José Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa Harcourt Brace, 2000 238 pp $24 The twentieth century was the era of …
