fiction Summer 2018

The Return of the Real

At some point after 1986, when he arrived in the United States, Amitava Kumar discovered what he later called an anxiety endemic to the “expatriate Indian.” He sensed that the longer he stayed in his new country, the more he risked “losing touch with the society he took as his subject.” He used that fear, in many darting, subtle essays and several books, to urge himself toward a style that was scrupulously faithful to what he saw and heard. “The mannered delivery of lines” in 1990s Hindi movies, the bodies of people poisoned by uranium in a small Jharkhand mining town, and the speech of New

culture November 16, 2016

Counternarratives by John Keene

The stories in Counternarratives, winner of the 2016 Lannan Literary Award, capture the efforts of enslaved or nominally free people of color to give their stymied, overflowing consciousnesses room to unfold.

The American author John Keene writes sentences that begin in states of tight restraint, steadily loosen, unravel, sprawl or expand, and then—in their last few beats—contract suddenly into piercingly acute points. One such sentence comes two-thirds of the way into an epically named story, "Gloss on A History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic, 1790-1825; Or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows," included in Keene's remarkable new short fiction collection Counternarratives. The sentence conveys—among other things—one of the story's grimmest plot twists. A dead, unidentified

politics August 10, 2016

Richard Price’s Screen Tests

The New York of The Night Of—an eight-episode HBO miniseries adapted by the novelist and screenwriter Richard Price from the British TV drama Criminal Justice—is gray, windswept, and blanketed in gloom. Watching the show’s first five episodes, four of which were directed by the show’s co-creator Steven Zaillian, we pass from a sparsely populated Upper West Side block to a dingy police booking station; from a well-furnished yet somehow oppressive house in Queens to a still more oppressive district court; from a support group for men battling skin conditions to a block in Rikers where obscure

culture September 25, 2015

Multitudinous Heart: Selected Poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Early in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, a young man obsessed with suicide proposes a thought experiment: “Imagine a stone the size of a big house; it’s hanging there, and you are under it; if it falls on you, on your head—will it be painful?” That speculation never seems far from the mind of the great Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–87).

Early in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, a young man obsessed with suicide proposes a thought experiment: “Imagine a stone the size of a big house; it’s hanging there, and you are under it; if it falls on you, on your head—will it be painful?” That speculation never seems far from the mind of the great Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–87). Much of Drummond’s work—from the crystalline verse he assembled in career-making collections like Feeling of the World (1940), José (1942), and Rose of the People (1945) to the blustery, sometimes turgid material he produced further into his middle

Max Nelson