Literature

Fiction

Things Fall Apart

Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers chronicles how one prosperous German Jewish family struggled to answer the question: When is it time to leave?

February 12, 2026 issue

Regina Marler

Teacher’s Pet

Jane DeLynn’s autobiographical novel In Thrall recounts a same-sex affair between a teenager and her closeted English teacher in the early 1960s, a time when exposure could be more traumatic than exploitation.

February 12, 2026 issue

Joanna Biggs

Staying Power

In Ruth, Kate Riley portrays the interior life of her title character with a richness that is at odds with Ruth’s austere Anabaptist community.

November 20, 2025 issue

Kevin Power

All the Sad Unliterary Men

David Szalay’s recent novel Flesh captures with unsparing accuracy the consciousness of an ordinary man in helpless decline.

January 15, 2026 issue

Yiyun Li

A Talent for Living

In Beryl Bainbridge’s novels, to die is an awfully big adventure—and so is to live.

January 15, 2026 issue

Colin Grant

It Takes a Village

The Trinidadian writer Harold Sonny Ladoo’s novel Yesterdays is relentlessly rude and crude, but also bold, experimental, truthfully ugly, and unforgettable.

December 18, 2025 issue

Michael Dirda

Panoply of the Weird

Little known today, Fitz-James O’Brien deserves serious attention for developing some of science fiction’s most familiar tropes—among them microcosmic worlds, invisible monsters, time slips, and robots.

January 15, 2026 issue

Francine Prose

‘Botany of Sorrow’

The world, Georgi Gospodinov seems to say in his novel Death and the Gardener, will always remain split into two parts: before and after the catastrophe of losing a parent.

December 18, 2025 issue

Essays by Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith

The Instrumentalist

At the heart of the film Tár is a conductor who cannot see beyond her generation’s field of vision.

January 19, 2023 issue

Zadie Smith

In Defense of Fiction

We have found fiction wanting in myriad ways but rarely paused to wonder, or recall, what we once wanted from it.

October 24, 2019 issue

President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G7 Summit, Krün, Germany, June 2015

Zadie Smith

On Optimism and Despair

If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities.

December 22, 2016 issue

More by Zadie Smith

Edmund White (1940–2025)

Remembering Edmund White

A selection of Edmund White’s contributions to The New York Review. Read all of his essays here.

Edmund White

A Hungry Little Boy

January 12, 2012 issue

Edmund White

Forster in Love: The Story

November 6, 2014 issue

Edmund White

I Do, I Do

August 14, 2014 issue

Edmund White

Is There a Good Way to Be Gay?

October 25, 2012 issue

Edmund White

Nabokov’s Passion

March 29, 1984 issue

Edmund White

Ecstatic Truth

June 28, 2018 issue

Edmund White

The House of Edith

April 26, 2007 issue

Edmund White

The High Wire of Jean Cocteau

November 24, 2016 issue

Edmund White

Proust the Passionate Reader

April 4, 2013 issue

The Latest

Ben Lerner

Crowds and Lovers

In his novel G., John Berger shifts between the revolutionary possibilities of mass demonstrations and of erotic encounters, ultimately writing a historical novel about the present.

April 9, 2026 issue

Miranda Seymour

Deciphering Dame Muriel

In Electric Spark, Frances Wilson attempts to crack the ingenious codes that were of prime importance in Muriel Spark’s life and writing.

April 9, 2026 issue

Omari Weekes

Possessing the Painful Parts

Tyriek White’s We Are a Haunting traces the lives of Black Brooklynites dealing with the porous boundaries between the past and the present as they forge lives amid the detritus that others have discarded.

April 9, 2026 issue

Cathleen Schine

The Possibility of Humor

In his novel A Fool’s Kabbalah, Steve Stern writes in a manic whirl of disturbing and hilarious images as he follows the great historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem on his journey to gather up the remains of a vanished civilization.

April 9, 2026 issue

Michael Dirda

Dantès’s Inferno

When I first read The Count of Monte Cristo, it offered something irresistible: the possibility of reinvention. If, against all odds, Edmond Dantès could remake himself, so could I.

April 9, 2026 issue

Richard Hell

Richard Hell Reads from Godlike

Episode 6 of Private Life

March 18, 2026

Richard Hell, in conversation with Jarrett Earnest

Richard Hell on Godlike and Poetry as a Way of Life

Episode 5 of Private Life

March 11, 2026

Meghan O’Gieblyn

The Island That Held Them

In David Greig’s novel The Book of I, a monk, a Viking, and a “mead wife” navigate a world torn between paganism and Christianity.

March 26, 2026 issue

Nathan Thrall

‘Dirty Work’

The Israeli writer S. Yizhar’s 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh portrays the violent reality of the Nakba. For decades it was part of the canon of Hebrew literature. That has changed.

March 26, 2026 issue

Aaron Matz

All of Us Yahoos

A new history of satire wants to limit the genre to its political ramifications, but satirists are often interested in the whole person and their capacity for vice.

March 26, 2026 issue