All the ancient-Greek tragedians put their personal stamps on preexisting myths, but in terms of panache, no one could match Euripides. Even while working within the boundaries of ancient-Greek mythos, he turned tales on their heads, irreverently vamping standards like Elektra. As poet and essayist Anne Carson wagers, “Euripides was a playwright of the fifth century BC who reinvented Greek tragedy, setting it on a path that leads straight to reality TV. His plays broke all the rules, upended convention and outraged conservative critics.”

A postulate: Queer writers do twentieth-century picaresque uniquely well. The picaro figure was, after all, a rogue, originally: slippery, necessarily on the move and on the make, situationally criminal, effectively fugitive. More or less the situation of lots of LGBT people reading the signs and crafting a life outside of compulsory (cis) heterosexuality in the US in, say, 1992, which is when twenty-first-century queer writer Andrea Lawlor sets their new novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. Ideally, in picaresque fiction, the resourceful hero’s attributes, those suited to navigating the margins of society, will seem to determine the

“Shalamov’s experience in the camps was longer and more bitter than my own,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago. “I respectfully confess that to him and not me it was given to touch those depths of bestiality and despair toward which life in the camps dragged us all.”

Since the turn of the century, the New Yorker has mentioned the German writer W. G. Sebald on seventy-seven occasions and devoted six longform articles to his ouevre. During the same period, Sebald’s contemporary Alexander Kluge has been named in that magazine only twice: once in reference to his films, not his novels, and another time to mention one of his works of theory—and only in the online edition. Why have two writers of such similar gifts, similar tastes, and—in Germany—equal stature, found such different receptions in the English-speaking world?

MARK GREIF: I think that Upstate is a beautiful book. Can you say a bit about how you came to write the novel?

In one sense, Keith Gessen’s A Terrible Country picks up where his first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, left off. That book’s last chapter is set in 2008, the year it was published, and narrated by one of the titular young men—needy, resentful, compulsively charming, and not always easily distinguishable Lost Boys who divide their time between anguished political musings, intellectual pissing contests, and the quest to disappoint as many attractive women as they can. After a few years spent mostly in Moscow, a city he notes is “what the world looked like before you covered it up

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