Volume 68, Number 5 (2021-03-25)

Regina Marler

The Emergency Everywhere

In Madeleine Watts’s The Inland Sea and Maxim Loskutoff’s Ruthie Fear, young women navigate danger from men and from themselves, against a backdrop of relentless climate catastrophe.

The Inland Sea

by Madeleine Watts

Ruthie Fear

by Maxim Loskutoff

Boris Dralyuk

To Hell with Unity

Biden’s ability to govern depends on abandoning any hope of reconciliation with the GOP.

Evan Kindley

The People We Know Best

Readers love fictional characters almost as if they were real people. Literary scholars are just starting to take them more seriously.

Character: Three Inquiries in Literary Studies

by Amanda Anderson, Rita Felski, and Toril Moi

Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession

by Marjorie Garber

Character as Form

by Aaron Kunin, with illustrations by David Scher

Balzac’s Lives

by Peter Brooks

Tishani Doshi

Advice for Pliny the Elder, Big Daddy of Mansplainers

a poem

Marina Warner

Fantastic beliefs, in the form of false claims and urban legends, have been traveling irresistibly since the eighteenth century. The effect today has been amplified by social media; mermaid sightings rank in popularity alongside those of aliens, angels, and unicorns.

Merpeople: A Human History

by Vaughn Scribner

Andrew Martin

Deeper into the Labyrinth

Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous books expand our sense of his novels and stories as a living system, as illogical and abrupt as the world we inhabit.

Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas

by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

The Spirit of Science Fiction

by Roberto Bolaño, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer

Darryl Pinckney

A Gift for the Long Game

Obama’s memoir of his first term is a story of aiming high and settling for what he could get.

A Promised Land

by Barack Obama

Vivian Gornick

Sex, Noir & Isolation

In his novels, Alfred Hayes explored what he saw as noir’s central concern: the inability to feel the reality of your own life, or anyone else’s.

In Love

by Alfred Hayes, with an introduction by Frederic Raphael

My Face for the World to See

by Alfred Hayes, with an introduction by David Thomson

The End of Me

by Alfred Hayes, with an introduction by Paul Bailey

Maureen N. McLane

Winter

a poem

Gary Saul Morson

Casting Pearls Before Repetilovs

The brief, dashing life of Alexander Griboedov, who wrote the most-performed play in the Russian repertory, married a princess, and died during a bloody uprising in Persia.

Woe from Wit: A Verse Comedy in Four Acts

by Alexander Griboedov, translated from the Russian by Betsy Hulick

The Death of the Vazir-Mukhtar

by Yuri Tynianov, translated from the Russian by Susan Causey and edited by Vera Tsareva-Brauner

The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar

by Yury Tynyanov, translated from the Russian by Anna Kurkina Rush and Christopher Rush

Dan Chiasson

This Ain’t No Disco

Talking Heads were at once a party band and an art project.

Remain in Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina

by Chris Frantz

Lydia Wilson

Sudden Monsters

Dima Wannous’s fiction asks where the boundaries lie between individual and collective fears in Syria, a country traumatized by violence.

The Frightened Ones

by Dima Wannous, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette

John Gray

Is Philosophy an Art?

In Witcraft, Jonathan Rée presents the history of English-language philosophy as a collection of artworks to be appreciated for their aesthetic qualities. But what did philosophers think they were doing?

Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English

by Jonathan Rée

Tash Aw

To Forget and Survive

Is it possible to excavate trauma, Asako Serizawa’s interlinked stories ask, if the people and countries concerned prefer their pain to remain buried?

Inheritors

by Asako Serizawa

Deborah Eisenberg