Have “postmodern” and “postwar” have become outmoded as classifications for novels? Lorentzen suggests it’s more useful to look at trends in fiction relative to the administration they were released under. During Obama’s, he says, novelists looked to answer questions of authenticity. During Trump’s, he anticipates dystopian narratives.
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Posted inProfiles & Interviews, Story, Writing
An Interview with MacArthur ‘Genius’ Viet Thanh Nguyen
2017 MacArthur fellow Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses questions of justice, diversity in literature, and empathy across cultures.
Posted inFiction, Quotes
The Trump Story Project
Slate is running short stories by contemporary writers based in an imagined “Trump’s America.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Writing for Rejection (and Reading Doris Lessing)
On reality, writing, publishing, fiction, non-fiction, Doris Lessing, and femininity: a writer muses on writing that impacted her, and what it means to write fiction at all.
Posted inBooks, History, Nonfiction, Story
When Sartre and Beauvoir Started a Magazine
In 1945, Les Temps modernes shocked the world with its pessimism and grim determination, and catapulted its founders into intellectual superstardom.
Posted inFiction, Quotes
The City Born Great: Fiction by N.K. Jemisin
Read The City Born Great, new fiction N.K. Jemisin, winner of a Hugo award for her novel, The Fifth Season.
Posted inProfiles & Interviews, Story
‘I Try Not to Have a Schedule’: Talking Writing with William Vollmann
Renowned for the size of his books as the magnitude of his subjects, the author is ready to take on waste and climate change.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The City Born Great: Fiction by N.K. Jemisin
When I relax my hands and open my eyes to see Paulo striding along the bridge toward me with another goddamned cigarette between his lips, I fleetingly see him for what he is again: the sprawling thing from my dream, all sparkling spires and reeking slums and stolen rhythms made over with genteel cruelty. I […]
Posted inEditor's Pick, Fiction, Quotes
The City Born Great: Fiction by N.K. Jemisin
Read The City Born Great, new fiction N.K. Jemisin, winner of a Hugo award for her novel, The Fifth Season.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story, Travel
The Island that Disappeared
An Englishman searches for what’s left of Providence, a failed Puritan colony in the Caribbean.
