Literature

Fiction

Unfinished Business

Claire-Louise Bennett’s novels have found a new language to evoke the often circular, abstracted nature of human consciousness.

November 5, 2026 issue

Daisy Hildyard

Privatized Stress

Saul Leslie’s A Working Title I Want to Change, a satire about the British supermarket chain Tesco, joins a spate of recent novels about people trying to survive the gig economy.

November 5, 2026 issue

Kathryn Hughes

Rebel Rebel

George Sand’s scandalous life, including a decade-long affair with Chopin, has obscured the influence of her many novels.

November 5, 2026 issue

Lola Seaton

Small Is Beautiful

Jonathan Buckley’s books embody the idea of writing as self-effacing transmission; their attentiveness to minor characters may be what the novel was built to do, but today it can feel radical.

October 22, 2026 issue

Jonathan Lethem

Second Chances

The reissue of Wilfrid Sheed’s 1966 novel Office Politics, about the dramas of running a literary magazine, raises the question of reprints and their popularity today.

October 22, 2026 issue

Regina Marler

Catalytic Ghosts

Ali Smith’s paired novels Gliff and Glyph are like a set of mirrors installed at irregular angles: themes repeat, flash, and fade, reflecting the afterimages of stories we can’t process or forget.

October 22, 2026 issue

Ariel Dorfman

The Strange Music of Mario Vargas Llosa

Mario Vargas Llosa’s final novel follows a thwarted dreamer who is writing a book that represents all of Peru through the sentimental dance music known as the vals peruano.

October 8, 2026 issue

James Walton

Data & Dames

In Nathaniel Rich’s Cloudthief, a heist and a femme fatale plunge an ecojournalist into an all-too-real climate collapse.

September 24, 2026 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

James Baldwin (1924–1987)

James Baldwin

James Baldwin

A Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis

January 7, 1971 issue

James Baldwin

God’s Country

March 23, 1967 issue

The Latest

Edwin Frank, in conversation with Jarrett Earnest

Edwin Frank on Love and Death in the American Novel

Season 2, Episode 3 of Private Life

October 7, 2026

Michael Gorra

Nothing Stays Buried

Nancy Lemann sets her sad screwball novels of manners in the closed-off world of upper-crust white New Orleans that she grew up in.

October 8, 2026 issue

Ange Mlinko

Flow Chart of Paris

The poet Lisa Robertson’s second novel achieves flights of erudition in its loving, archival meanderings around the city of Paris.

October 8, 2026 issue

Miranda Seymour

Chills of the Unsaid

In its skewering of London’s literary egos, Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House takes a step away from her previous parent-dominated novels, but it too is told by a middle-aged woman struggling to come to terms with her childhood and adolescence.

September 24, 2026 issue