Literature

Fiction

Road to Nowhere

Marguerite Young’s cult novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling springs from the supposedly mundane diners and bus depots of Young’s native Indiana, but eschews any stable sense of reality.

October 9, 2025 issue

Sue Halpern

The Twilight Zone

Laila Lalami’s prescient new novel follows a woman imprisoned by the government for her dreams.

August 21, 2025 issue

Frances Wilson

Charlotte Under Pressure

Elizabeth Gaskell’s greatest novel may have been her biography of Charlotte Brontë.

October 9, 2025 issue

Lola Seaton

Incorrigible Nudity

The illusion of effortlessness is a major source of the pleasure of Sheila Heti’s work: it makes us feel as though we could capture the world as easily.

July 24, 2025 issue

Michael Hofmann

Novels Without Food

How did a writer as unconventional as Andrey Platonov manage to write so many irresistibly interesting books?

June 12, 2025 issue

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

The Significance of Trivial Things

Exhibitions and books commemorating Jane Austen’s 250th birthday call attention to the ways in which she transmuted the ephemera of her life into the precious treasures that figure in her novels.

September 25, 2025 issue

Ruth Margalit

Forever Unmoored

Patrick Modiano’s grand theme is memory in unsettled times, with the characters in his novels caught between a mysterious past and a discordant present.

September 25, 2025 issue

Anahid Nersessian

Nobody’s Grand Tour

Michael Lentz’s novel Schattenfroh portrays a dystopia in which consciousness itself is just another commodity.

September 25, 2025 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

Edmund White (1940–2025)

Remembering Edmund White

A selection of Edmund White’s contributions to The New York Review. Read all of his essays here.

Edmund White

A Hungry Little Boy

January 12, 2012 issue

Edmund White

Forster in Love: The Story

November 6, 2014 issue

Edmund White

I Do, I Do

August 14, 2014 issue

Edmund White

Is There a Good Way to Be Gay?

October 25, 2012 issue

Edmund White

Nabokov’s Passion

March 29, 1984 issue

Edmund White

Ecstatic Truth

June 28, 2018 issue

Edmund White

The House of Edith

April 26, 2007 issue

Edmund White

The High Wire of Jean Cocteau

November 24, 2016 issue

Edmund White

Proust the Passionate Reader

April 4, 2013 issue

The Latest

Zadie Smith, Tash Aw, and Juan Gabriel Vásquez

The Solidarity of the Hopeful

Reflections on literature, politics, and religion from the second installment of the Georgetown Global Dialogues

October 31, 2025

Joanna Biggs

Staying Power

In Ruth, Kate Riley portrays the interior life of her title character with a richness that is at odds with Ruth’s austere Anabaptist community.

November 20, 2025 issue

Miranda Seymour

Mary Shelley’s ‘Hideous Progeny’

Through Mary Shelley’s letters, journal, and work-in-progress, we can trace the development of Frankenstein from a simple ghost story to her most famous novel.

November 20, 2025 issue

Mark Krotov

‘Who Is Mr. Babycarrot?’

The stories of the radical Italian children’s author Gianni Rodari always seem to be emerging anew, forged into being by accident or circumstance.

October 29, 2025

Francine Prose

Eden of Wolves

A nineteenth-century novella daringly suggests that there’s no reason the apparently contradictory theories of creationism and evolutionism can’t be reconciled.

November 6, 2025 issue

Regina Marler

Avant-Garde Égalité

Gabriële Buffet-Picabia tended to minimize her part in the development of modern art, but a new book positions her as a central figure.

November 6, 2025 issue

Hillary Kelly

Bedsit Metamorphoses

Tessa Hadley’s greatest subject is the unfulfilled promise of womanhood.

November 6, 2025 issue

Darryl Pinckney

Love’s Anguish and Force and Terror

Nicholas Boggs structures his moving new biography of James Baldwin around the writer’s most important relationships with men.

November 6, 2025 issue

Jessi Jezewska Stevens

Stripped of Myths

Sjón’s Red Milk casts doubt on whether radicalization can ever be rationally narrated.

October 23, 2025 issue

Christopher Tayler

In the Fourth Person

In Olga Tokarczuk’s work, knowing how to pick mushrooms—organisms open to unruliness and interconnection and resistant to easy labeling—is a sign of good character.

October 23, 2025 issue