Category: Fiction

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.

A video of a missing woman being murdered has surfaced on the internet, confirming the worst. Her boyfriend, lying low at a friend’s house, stumbles upon a radio program whose enigmatic host says she’s still alive.

A woman who doesn’t feel like going to work today stays in bed and looks at the internet instead. She finds a blog by a fed-up call center employee who complains about the customers.

The first page was blank. On the second page, in an almost illegible calligraphic script, was written “Manifesto for a House in the Sky.”

Not only will I never get my faith back, but I’m going to keep missing it. I’ll always have that longing — but there’s no going back into the garden.

‘We had had many arguments, but he was my brother; he had always been my brother.’

Two new books offer fresh perspective on “Otherhood,” that condition in which characters do constant, exhausting battle — for the most part — inside their own heads.

From Elisa Albert’s acclaimed 2006 collection, the infamous short story that turned Philip Roth’s playbook inside out.

High-stakes time travel adventure from sci-fi writer Jo Lindsay Walton.

A forester’s daughter spends a night in a cabin in Soviet Russia, but it takes decades to discover how much danger she put her family in.

We use Facebook to access certain apps and stay in touch with distant friends and relatives. Deleting Facebook won’t stop other companies from misusing our data.

A conversation about writing novels that have roots in reality.

Must-read stories from Han Kang, Porochista Khakpour, and Min Jin Lee.

The author on his writing process and what it was like to watch a film based on one of his books.

Jeff Sharlet on how recovering from a life-threatening event takes place moment by moment.