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Éric Rohmer’s Novel “Élisabeth” Is a Precocious Literary Triumph
The undercurrent of unsatisfied lust that runs through “Élisabeth” bursts to the fore when Michel, giving a high-school student named…
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novels
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Eight Great American Novels
You know what they say: a semiquincentennial happens only once, but great American literature is forever. Whether we can all agree on what…
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A Trollish New Campus Novel Hates Students and Professors Alike
The novel’s main two conflicts center on the university. First, there is an ongoing existential battle being waged between the university…
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Marie Arana and Writing Between Reality and Imagination
Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin This is a book that really confuses the place where reality and imagination meet. I am crazy about…
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Muriel Spark, the Double Agent
When Spark was in her mid-thirties, in London, she had a psychotic breakdown, provoked by malnourishment and an amphetamine addiction. One…
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Gwendoline Riley’s New Novel Surveys the Wreckage of Middle Age
That repeated “nothing” is surely a deliberate echo of the “ ‘Nothing?’ ‘Nothing.’ ” in “King Lear,” when Lear beseeches each of his three…
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The Patron Saint of Oddballs and Delinquents
The New Orleans writer Nancy Lemann conjures scenes of booze-soaked calamity, where everyone and everything is on the verge of rot. Source…
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He Wrote a Book About Interviewing. Here’s His Interview.
I want to be able to speak freely, and I want you to be able to speak freely, and in order to do that I think you should have more freedom…
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The Timeless Provocations of “Wuthering Heights” (the Novel)
A great fuss surrounds Emerald Fennell’s anachronistic adaptation, but Emily Brontë’s ruthless text will always have the last word. Source…
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How Do You Write About the Inexplicable?
I’m a rational person. I grew up in a family of scientists. My dad, who studied the brain, told me when I was a kid that Santa and God…
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A Student Chases the Shadows of Tiananmen
In the beginning of Ha Jin’s new novel, “Looking for Tank Man,” a sophomore at Harvard seems to be on the verge of throwing her life away.…
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Solvej Balle’s Novels Rewire the Time Loop
Before Tara Selter, the protagonist of “On the Calculation of Volume,” a series by the Danish author Solvej Balle, gets trapped in a time…
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George Saunders and Zadie Smith Talk with Deborah Treisman
On October 25, 2025, the writers George Saunders and Zadie Smith took the stage with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman,…
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The “Unfit” Mothers of Ariana Harwicz
The Argentinean author Ariana Harwicz writes slim books that draw on a slim band of resources, as if she pulled them from a narrow row of…
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Brandon Taylor on the Quandary of Black Art
Plus he’s hot. He’s a hot Catholic priest who, in my mind, I was picturing Joe Alwyn the whole time. I want to see the portraits Wyeth…
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Great Gay Novels Recommended by the Director of “The History of Sound”
In Oliver Hermanus’s new film, “The History of Sound,” two young men at the New England Conservatory of Music meet in a bar, when one of…
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The 2025 National Book Awards Longlist
This week, The New Yorker is announcing the longlists for the 2025 National Book Awards, including Young People’s Literature, Translated…
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“I Who Have Never Known Men” Is a Warning
When my twelve-year-old self picked up “I Who Have Never Known Men” from a church rummage sale in 1998, I was certain it was a book…
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Coming of Age in Panic Mode
The books of Michael Clune, or at least the ones written for a nonacademic audience, have focussed on very particular chapters of his…
Beauty
The Lesson in Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko Novels
What are these reading projects we set for ourselves? Acts of recompense? One began for me when an advance copy of Martin Cruz Smith’s…
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Amy Bloom’s Favorite Family Novels
Amy Bloom’s latest novel, “I’ll Be Right Here,” tells the story of a single family across more than eight decades. The span of the book…
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Richard Price’s Street Life
When I arrived at the novelist Richard Price’s five-story, nineteenth-century brownstone, in East Harlem, in December, the doorbell was…