Category: Fiction

Ann and Jeff Vandermeer discuss talking animals, the weird/fantasy divide, and the ‘rate of fey’ as an organizing principle in their new anthology of classic fantasy.

In two new novels, the bunnies are anything but cute. (Unless … you use magic to turn one of them into a pre-TB Keats, or a talky Tim Riggins.)

“What’s considered high art? What’s lowbrow? What are those things? That’s something that, as a person who like, lives at 7-Eleven, I’m extremely interested in.”

Kathleen Alcott’s latest novel is a dramatic reenactment of the ethical dilemmas posed in antiwar activist Father Daniel Berrigan’s ’60s manifesto.

“Outside Looking In” dramatizes the discovery of LSD and the cult of personality surrounding Timothy Leary. Our reviewer drops acid and thinks about how, for women, it can be safer to be a downer.

Chia-Chia Lin talks about the wildness of domestic spaces and writing her novel “The Unpassing” through the early months of motherhood.

The recently re-appreciated novelist Rachel Ingalls passed away last month. She was among a cohort of twentieth-century women writers who were ‘famous for not being famous.’

A new homeowner reads two novels that revolve around surreal home-invasion scenarios, and considers what it is about his house that scares him.

Susan Choi talks about feeling unsure of oneself, as a writer, as a performer — or as a victim — and about how her latest novel evolved in uncanny tandem with the real world.

Kali Fajardo-Anstine talks about her new short story collection “Sabrina & Corina,” her obsession with dualities, and Chicano and Indigenous history in Denver.

Nathan Englander talks about the “super-American world” of Orthodox Judaism, Philip Roth’s funeral, and training himself to write his new novel “kaddish.com” while daydreaming.

“I joke that this is the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for.”

“The books from ‘Trainspotting’ onwards have been about deindustrialization … the cruel existential panic that we feel, in the sense that we don’t really know what we’re here for anymore.”

“The whiteboy said there was nothing left for me in Houston, he said that I didn’t have to punish myself, and he said my name, my actual name.”

Dror Burstein’s “Muck” sets a difficult course through themes of power, pita bread, and invasion, mixing up the biblical past and the just-as-lamentable present.

“I was thinking a lot about childhood as this special status, an almost endangered status … that is eroded the more that we start thinking of ourselves as these units of value and worrying about what we’re worth.”

When a refugee flees to another country and claims asylum, she is, in effect, petitioning the state to listen to her story.

Ann Leckie talks about “The Raven Tower,” the erasure of women writers from the canon, the privilege inherent to ‘the anxiety of influence,’ and the power of tradition.

In Mark Doten’s “Trump Sky Alpha,” a journalist who has survived Trump’s nuclear apocalypse gets an assignment from what’s left of the New York Times Magazine: find out what people were tweeting as the bombs fell.

In the midst of the Syrian Civil War, three grown siblings attempt to fulfill their father’s final wish. The journey is dangerous, but that’s no surprise; nowadays, death is always hard work.

To write “Lost Children Archive,” Valeria Luiselli studied the refugee crisis “obliquely,” reading about other historical moments of children’s mass displacement, amassing a reader’s archive of loss.

In Scapellato’s new novel, a man is pulled into a noir detective mystery he doesn’t want to solve.

Laskar’s debut novel imagines an alternate ending to an incident from her real life: When law enforcement agents raided her home, and confiscated her unfinished novel, what if she had refused to comply?

In Elizabeth McCracken’s new novel “Bowlaway,” the past and future are mysteriously entangled.

Man Booker winner Marlon James immersed himself in African myths and history, so he could use that world as a springboard for a new fantasy series.

Gabriela Garcia’s short story about a women fighting a cold war with her new neighbor is deeply political without explicitly being about politics at all.

Stories by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Min Jin Lee, and Saul Bellow.

“It’s difficult to say what you really think. You’re too aware of the traps, the dead ends, the cul-de-sacs of utterance: all the ways we let cliché steer us in a certain direction, force us to say not quite what we mean…”

A trip to a Swedish stone-age burial site gives an archaeologist too close a look at death.

Tessa Hadley on gaining the sense of authority she needed to write fiction, the authors whose work opens the door for her to write, and the way we are formed by our connections with other people.