Literature

Fiction Poetry Biography & Memoir In Translation Essays

The Poet’s Double

In the early years of the Soviet Union, Konstantin Vaginov wrote fiction and poetry characterized by a sense of doubleness, ambiguity, and perverse humor.

March 12, 2026 issue

Edward Mendelson

Deeper Than They Thought

Although Margaret Kennedy has been largely forgotten as a popular writer, in her novels she wielded the most cunning techniques of literary modernism.

March 12, 2026 issue

Christopher Benfey

Road Trippers

In a thirty-three-day ramble along the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers in 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison encountered many of the issues that would end up plaguing the United States.

March 12, 2026 issue

Colin Grant

If These Walls Could Talk

In A House for Miss Pauline, the Jamaican novelist Diana McCaulay examines her family’s shadowy history by telling the story of a woman who builds her house with the remains of the manor of a former slave plantation.

March 12, 2026 issue

Linda Greenhouse

As Kennedy Went

Justice Anthony Kennedy often confounded Supreme Court observers with his seemingly unpredictable opinions, but during the years when a majority could be achieved only through some measure of compromise, he wielded enormous power over the Constitution’s contemporary meaning.

March 12, 2026 issue

Alec Wilkinson

The Wandering Physicist

Luis Alvarez brought a scientific pragmatism to many of the twentieth century’s greatest mysteries, including the secrets of pyramids, the Kennedy assassination, and the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

March 12, 2026 issue

Vivian Gornick

Mother Trouble

In her new memoir, Arundhati Roy tries to find the language to grapple with the shadow of her formidable, extraordinary mother.

February 26, 2026 issue

Namwali Serpell

Toni Plays the Dozens

What’s so funny about Toni Morrison?

February 26, 2026 issue

From the Archives

Books and Bookstores

Caitlin O’Keefe

Feminism & Shakespeare and Company

November 18, 2019

Charles Rosen

The Lost Pleasure of Browsing

October 13, 2009

Roberto Bolaño

Who Would Dare?

March 22, 2011

Larry McMurtry

The Last Book Sale

August 17, 2012

Charles Simic

The Books We’ve Lost

August 13, 2013

Tom Vanderbilt

Maestro of the Strand

January 4, 2018

Coming of Age

Sasha Frere-Jones

Intentionality

I remember wanting to be in a band when I was nine.

October 8, 2023

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Finding My Roots

The storytellers who taught me over the course of my career all knew how to bring Black history vividly to life.

September 29, 2023

Melissa Febos

Dear Judy

Judy Blume gave voice to many of the feelings I experienced during adolescence, but there were some she didn’t name.

August 11, 2023

Lucy Jakub

Love’s Work

In his films for children, Hayao Miyazaki has used the labor-intensive art of animation to study the major problem of adult life.

July 13, 2023

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007)

Elizabeth Hardwick

A selection of Elizabeth Hardwick’s contributions to the New York Review. Read all of her essays here.

Elizabeth Hardwick

On Sylvia Plath

May 23, 2013 issue

Elizabeth Hardwick

Caesar’s Things

September 24, 1970 issue

Elizabeth Hardwick

In Maine

October 7, 1971 issue

Elizabeth Hardwick

The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King

May 9, 1968 issue

Elizabeth Hardwick

Writing a Novel

October 18, 1973 issue

Elizabeth Hardwick

The Menendez Show

February 17, 1994 issue

The Latest

Mark Polizzotti, in conversation with Jarrett Earnest

Mark Polizzotti on André Breton, Translation, and Surrealism

Episode 7 of Private Life

March 25, 2026

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

Ange Mlinko

Mother Daughter Sister Wife

A new anthology of female Hungarian poets engages with the nation’s often tragic history through various forms of reticence, misdirection, and playfulness.

April 9, 2026 issue

Timothy Donnelly

Ondine

a poem

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