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.

Eden of Wolves

A nineteenth-century novella daringly suggests that there’s no reason the apparently contradictory theories of creationism and evolutionism can’t be reconciled.

Poisoning the Family Tree

Joe Dunthorne’s Children of Radium is an account of his search for information about his great-grandfather, a German Jewish scientist who helped develop chemical weapons for the Nazis.

In a Good Way

“The contemporary novel is not only alive and well but healthier than ever: as brave, as accomplished, certainly more diverse.”

More Than Just Acknowledgments

Tommy Orange’s novels document the shifting balance between the blessings and curses of modern Native life, most of which have been in operation since long before the characters were born.

Poem & Prayer

Despite the gravity of subjects in Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, which include addiction and an obsession with the metaphysical, what makes the novel feel light is its bravado, buoyancy, and innovative form.

Chile’s Count Dracula

Pablo Larraín’s film El Conde makes the bloodthirstiness of Pinochet’s regime literal.

Carlotta’s Brooklyn

It’s a daring move, paraphrasing a masterpiece like Joyce’s Ulysses, but in his new novel, Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta, James Hannaham shows us why a writer might do it.

‘We Know What That’s Like’

The filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s recent arrest in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison marks the latest phase in a campaign that the Iranian judiciary has been waging against him for over a decade.

L’Esprit de l’Escalier

Heimito von Doderer’s midcentury novel The Strudlhof Steps restores Vienna to a brighter era, when, for most of the privileged, suffering entailed no more than ordinary heartbreak.

Laughing Last

In Molly Keane’s novels and plays, justice rarely triumphs, virtue is infrequently rewarded. Even tragedy can wear the mask of the grotesque and absurd.

Living with Saint Death

Mariana Enriquez’s fiction is haunted by the specter of late-twentieth-century Latin American history; the bodies are never buried very deep.

‘Their Chaotic Mouths’

What Can’t Be Forgotten

The Immigrant at Home

Wooster’s Tribute to Kantor

The Wooster Group’s A Pink Chair (in Place of a Fake Antique) suggests what it might have been like to watch a ghost materialize on stage, called up by an early-twentieth-century medium.

Boogie Nights

Truth in Advertising

There’s a great beauty in the determination and ferocious bravery of Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand)—and in the purity of McDormand’s choice of art and truth over glamour and vanity in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Censoring the 'Sensitivity Reader'

The culture of young adult fiction is partly dedicated to helping young people avoid and resist bullying, yet it is being shaped by online posts whose aggressive, even ferocious, tone could itself be described as online bullying.

This Empty House

One may wind up concluding that by far the most terrifying thing about Mother! is that Darren Aronofsky seems to be Hollywood’s idea of an intellectual, our own brainy, home-grown auteur.