Category: Fiction

“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.

Sarah Moss’s tale of Iron Age reenactors and parental abuse is her way of addressing Brexit. “Putting the skulls of the ancestors up in some attempt to hold back history never works.”

A New Yorker reads “Seasonal Associate” in the age of HQ2.

No longer able to live on her freelance writing income, German novelist Heike Geissler takes a holiday seasonal job at an Amazon fulfillment center.

Guy Gunaratne’s Man Booker-longlisted “In Our Mad and Furious City” recognizes multiple, overlapping versions of London and its inhabitants, examining the ways violence can bubble up through the city’s fissures.

Jean Améry, the Austrian essayist and Primo Levi’s former barrack-mate at Auschwitz, wrote one last novel before he died. Its six angry chapters are written as if by Charles Bovary, accusing Flaubert of ruining his life.

For author Jaclyn Gilbert, revising her writing is much like doing the same running loops over and over, to the point where she doesn’t have to think about where she’s going anymore.

In Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s fantastical short story collection, the strangest fantasy of all is that people try to act morally in a corrupt world.

When accompanying his father to the emergency room, a writer reflects on how he developed his talent — and why that’s a story he can never tell his father.

“It was important to me that the ‘villains’ in the book were ordinary people, because readers are ordinary people, and people who do terrible things are often ordinary people.”

Barbara Kingsolver takes a rigorous, scientific approach to her novels’ subjects — but, as a woman writer, her authority is often challenged.

When Eleanor takes a break from reading the news, her laptop goes missing. Full of self-abnegation, she asks Wallace Shawn for advice.

Sjón’s “CoDex 1962” is the fulfillment of a pact he made with the Maharal of Prague in the Old Jewish Cemetery almost three decades ago.