Tag: fiction

Roxane Gay writes about the necessary and inevitable influence of politics on literature at this fraught time in history.

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 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.

In Ling Ma’s “Severance” — a novel she began to write after getting laid off, while living partly on severance pay — the characters keep going to work, even though they know it’s the end of the world.

“When I write, I’m creating a character, and then I’m just performing that character, and typing what they say.”

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

To this day, when my mother is driving a car, she will only use the blinkers to indicate that she’s turning at the last second — just so that people behind her don’t know where she’s going.

Leaning in doesn’t work in real life. When I was writing, I kind of hoped that it would. I think I hoped that the answers are always within me. And when I reached the end of the book, it was like: there are no answers.

Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy is the embodiment of concept that the personal is political, even (especially?) in her fiction.

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.

Many of us can viscerally remember what it was like to be young and overwhelmed by the power of our youth.

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

Jason Diamond analyzes his obsession with Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks from the 80s.

In this short story, the children of Chinese miners in the frontier West struggle to survive after their parents’ death.

Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about how ghosts and authors of fiction share a similar role in today’s culture.

In Don Waters’ short story “Full of Days,” a grieving Las Vegas man uses an anti-abortion billboard to justify his own pained existence.

Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on The Train and Into the Water, reflects on two unreliable things: narrators and memory.

With a new “lost” short story published by The New Yorker, the bottle is just about dry.

Novelist Nell Zink, in n+1, takes readers on a rambling but sharp journey through writers and novels of the 20th century in the name of exploring realism, compassion, and justice in fiction.

The cover was striking: it showed a syringe. On the back cover one character leaned over a table, snorting cocaine. The calls from radio stations began, the advertising spots, the letters, above all the letters. Girls telling me about their first acid trip. Gay guys who’d been thrown out of their houses. Girls in love […]

Alec Nevala-Lee, author of Astounding, a forthcoming book on the history of science fiction, digs into the writing career of L. Ron Hubbard, gaining new insights into the life of the controversial founder of dianetics and the origins and nature of Scientology itself.

In Vulture, book critic Christian Lorentzen suggests we dispense with terms like “postmodern” and “postwar” when discussing novels, and instead analyze them relative to the presidential administrations under which they were released. What will we mean when someday we refer to Obama Lit? I think we’ll be discussing novels about authenticity, or about “problems of […]

Stories from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Michael Chabon, Jhumpa Lahiri, and more.

“The car had upset me. Judy had found a parking space right in front of the restaurant and I could see the red car from our table. Taunting me.”

Read The City Born Great, new fiction N.K. Jemisin, winner of a Hugo award for her novel, The Fifth Season.

Two young sisters living in Thailand sneak off their diplomatic compound for a night of beauty and danger in this spellbinding short story.

“These stories are a marvel and will break your heart.”

After so many years, are you still sure about your decision to remain in the shadows? “Remain in the shadows” is not an expression I like. It savors of plots, assassins. Let’s say that, fifteen years ago, I chose to publish books without having to feel obliged to make a career of being a writer. […]

The Harper’s digital archive is a small and unsung national treasure, at least as far as I’m concerned; I’ve spent countless hours sifting through old issues, scanning for early work from familiar names and tracking down forgotten gems from authors whose bylines have largely faded. One such writer is Margot Hentoff, whose short story “Where Do […]

Yoko Tawada’s English-language publisher, New Directions, describes her slender book The Bridegroom Was a Dog in simple and straightforward terms: “A bizarre tale of passion and romance between a schoolteacher and a dog.” There is, of course, complexity to this tight and colorful novella (written in 1993, and translated from Japanese in 1998), in which the life of […]