THE NARRATORS of Antonio di Benedetto’s “Trilogy of Expectation” blur further in each successive book, until they are all but effaced. In Zama,published in 1956, the narrator has a name (Don Diego de Zama), a location (the Spanish colony of Paraguay), and several exact dates (we encounter him in 1790, then again in 1794, and […]
WRITTEN MORE THAN a decade after Stonewall but taking place five years prior to it, Jane DeLynn’s In Thrall is a grimly comic tale of dyke awakening. This 1982 novel, reissued by Semiotext(e), recounts the sexual relationship—at once pitiful, elating, and perverse—between the book’s first-person narrator, Lynn, a sixteen-year-old senior at a selective all-girls high […]
SOME OF US are still getting over Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library. It’s been nearly forty years since the young aristocrat Will Beckwith sucked and fucked his way through an all-male London on the cusp of the AIDS epidemic. But for more than a few people I know, phrases from the novel can still conjure, […]
MY MATERNAL GRANDPARENTS were born in the former Yugoslavia, a nation bloodily dissolved in 1991. I was one year old. A decade later, on Easter, I brought potica, a babka-like Slovenian pastry my mother always made on holidays, to my Indianapolis elementary school. “Hey,” I said. “Here’s some Yugoslavian holiday bread,” because that’s what my […]
A YOUNG POLE WITH LUNG DISEASE arrives in the Silesian village of Görbersdorf in a mountain valley known for its good air and tuberculosis sanatorium. The year is 1913, and people are talking about the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and political tensions in the Balkans. He checks into a room in […]
THE UNNAMED NARRATOR of Small Rain will be familiar to readers of Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You and Cleanness: poet, teacher, expat, gay. Those two books of fiction trace the poet’s life in Bulgaria, where he teaches English literature to high schoolers, though a difficult childhood under a violent patriarch in Kentucky intrudes on […]
I DON’T REMEMBER WHEN I first heard the term “incel” but I do recall my reaction: I don’t want to know about these guys. You feel sympathy for lonely people, of course, but it would seem that their constitution as a class or identity category in the internet age, while perhaps inevitable, can only compound […]
RIOTS IN PARIS GRAB THE HEADLINES, but the real radicalism in France happens in the countryside. Take the zone à défendre, or ZAD, in Notre-Dame-des-Landes. What began in 2012 as a farmer’s protest against the construction of an airport turned into a successful squatter campaign that drew allies from environmental and anarchist groups across the […]
THE DEFINITION OF INSANITY, as the cliché goes, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, yet American intellectuals have been founding little magazines since at least 1840, when a group of Transcendentalists published the inaugural issue of The Dial—often cited as the progenitor of the form on this side […]
OVER THE COURSE of two seasons of the TV sitcom Mixed-ish, a spin-off of ABC’s eight-season hit Black-ish, biracial protagonist Rainbow Johnson tries to adapt to regular life after a childhood spent in an idyllic race-blind hippie commune. In episode after episode, innocent Rainbow encounters confusing, contradictory examples of how race operates in the mainstream […]
I AM NOT SAYING that I conjured a new Sally Rooney novel, but last year, I posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, “I know she just published a book, but like . . . when is Sal Roones coming back. I need her,” and a few months later, it was announced that she would […]
BEFORE READING GABRIEL SMITH’S DEBUT NOVEL BRAT, I did the normal thing and googled him. I thought I remembered seeing his name on my Twitter feed: in February, Smith had posted a screenshot of a hoax email from Charli XCX, in which she divulged that she was “a HUGE fan” of his writing and asked […]
MARRIAGE IS A GRIM BUSINESS—worse still if you’re a woman in a Rachel Cusk book. The blame lies with Christian iconography, she writes in her 2012 memoir, Aftermath, and pictures of the “holy family, that pious unit that sucked the world’s attention dry.” There, we found Mary and the manger, the Christ child, cuckolded Joseph: […]
SHEILA HETI: Your new novel, Help Wanted (W. W. Norton, $29), is about the collective action of a group of workers at a big-box store. They try to get their hated boss out of their hair in a way that is counterintuitive and comic. It feels completely different from your 2013 book, The Love Affairs […]
IN THE PROLOGUE TO CLAIRE MESSUD’S This Strange Eventful History, the unnamed narrator goes to see a witch, a “clairvoyant,” while on holiday in some seaside New England town: Though I told her I was a writer, she insisted that I was a healer; once she said it, I willed it to be true. Or: […]
IN THE FIRST PAGES of All Fours, Miranda July’s second novel, the unnamed narrator confesses to collecting intimate ephemera from her friends’ relationships. But the “artifacts”—“screenshots of sexts, emails to their mothers,” recordings of conversations—never add up to something substantial. Her impulse to acquire these relics is “like trying to grab smoke by its handle,” […]
IN HARI KUNZRU’S NOVEL My Revolutions (2007), which starts in Britain in 1998, the narrator, a fifty-year-old named Michael Frame, receives a visit from an old friend, Miles, the only person who knows that he is a former violent radical living under an assumed identity. To the delight of Michael’s younger wife and late-adolescent stepdaughter, Miles reels […]
IF THE MEASURE of a debut is how capably it shits on the pieties of its literary forebears, then Honor Levy’s funny, provocative My First Book is an unqualified success. The fact that I, an Elder Millennial, found it largely inscrutable proves the point. Though nominally fiction—at least according to the metadata—the sixteen pieces collected […]
OPEN ANY BOOK BY CAROLINE BLACKWOOD and you will encounter the same woman. Articulate, adrift, callous, cosmically self-absorbed. She’s in the middle of her life, a retired actress or model, once striking and sought-after. Her misery has a predatory quality. Decisions made idly and capriciously she now clings to as essential facets of her “character.” […]
KARL KRAUS WROTE THAT EVERYTHING FITS WITH EVERYTHING ELSE. Maybe. Maybe everything in an artist’s corpus, no matter how incongruous, reflects, repeats, rhymes. Yet this is not the case for Percival Everett. No thematic or formal schema is suitable. He climbs the stairs sideways. His patently ridiculous conceits seem like challenges to his own mischievousness, […]
