Literature

In Translation

Peter C. Baker

Staying Alive

Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall is a gripping drama of survival that plays with the conventions of the “last man” genre.

April 18, 2024 issue

Sigrid Nunez

‘An Archaic Country,’ Dark and Bright

A new collection of stories by the novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya celebrates the women of Russia, countering the frequent bleakness and tragedy of their lives with tenderness and optimism.

March 21, 2024 issue

Frances Wilson

Across the Moominverse

Small books bearing great burdens, the Moomins contain the whole arsenal of Western literature.

January 18, 2024 issue

Katie Trumpener

A Eulogy of Failed Remembrance

Alexander Kluge’s account of the Allied air raid on his hometown in Germany, while suffering memory lapses of its own, examines the city’s amnesia as a defense against terror.

January 18, 2024 issue

Colm Tóibín

In the Streets of Barcelona

In Antagony, the Spanish writer Luis Goytisolo attempts to imagine a new sort of novel in which the streets have the force of character and urban topography has its own destiny.

December 21, 2023 issue

Joshua Cohen

The Imps of His Age

In a harrowing, witty novel by Miroslav Krleža, written in Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II, a mediocre lawyer succumbs to the impetus to speak against all reason.

June 6, 2023

Christine Smallwood

Poor Torvey!

A new production of A Doll’s House starring Jessica Chastain emphasizes that everyone in Ibsen’s play suffers under the binding ties of patriarchy.

April 6, 2023

Sophie Pinkham

Invasion, Day by Day

Yevgenia Belorusets’s War Diary is rigorous in its focus on the interior life, asking what it means to be at home during a war.

December 7, 2023 issue

The Latest

Zadie Smith

The Dream of the Raised Arm

In early Thirties Germany, as the Nazi threat grew, the state’s propaganda machine began to penetrate the dream life of its citizenry. What of our dreams today, under the influence of the algorithms? And what will come with the return of Donald Trump?

December 5, 2024 issue

Christine Smallwood

As I Lay Dying

Across thousands of pages, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Morning Star series presents a relentless excess of its characters’ inner lives; at its best, it poses troubling questions about the scope of human knowledge.

November 7, 2024 issue

Julia Kornberg

The Basement Tapes

At the end of his life, Reinaldo Arenas dictated his posthumously published memoir into a recorder. The newly unearthed tapes reveal a writer working beyond his mythology.

September 21, 2024

Alice Kaplan

The Posthumous Autobiographer

Michel Leiris’s literary memoirs belong to a form almost unrecognizable today; they are driven not by plot—the narrative arc—but by words.

October 3, 2024 issue

Ruth Franklin

Writing Out of Annihilation

In the Warsaw Ghetto, the journalist Rokhl Auerbach risked her life to capture the stories of the Jewish community and, by writing about the people she knew, memorialized an entire lost world.

September 19, 2024 issue

Natasha Wimmer

The Watercolorist

The short fiction of Ángel Bonomini possesses a lightness that sets him apart from contemporaries like Borges and Cortázar.

July 18, 2024 issue

Yuri Slezkine

A Sacred Scripture of Doubt

A new book by Gary Saul Morson tells how Russian realist fiction foretold, frustrated, and outlived the Bolshevik quest for certainty.

July 18, 2024 issue

Scholastique Mukasonga

Forever Elsewhere

In keeping with the inalienable rights of the Storyteller, allow me to invent a different fall from grace.

June 19, 2024

Larry Rohter

In the Heart of Bahia

Itamar Vieira Junior’s first novel, Crooked Plow, tells a story of suffering, resistance, revenge, and redemption set in the impoverished, arid Brazilian Northeast.

June 6, 2024 issue

Catherine Lacey

The Woman in the Well

In Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes, a dissatisfied Italian everywoman starts keeping a diary, and eventually her own thoughts become too much to bear.

May 23, 2024 issue