July 18, 2024 Fiction Issue

“Ami Police”: A Story

“An impressive row of necklaces dangled from her neck, and in terror I noticed, shining like diamonds, roughly sewn onto tiny lockets along each chain, dozens of small eyes crowned with minuscule mirror shards.”

Marilynne Robinson

Agreeing to Our Harm

We ignore at our peril the rage that animates Trump voters and threatens Biden’s chances this fall.

Elizabeth Willis

The Perils of Pauline (1914)

a poem

Anne Enright

The High Irish Style

John McGahern sought formality and distance in his prose, but his masterful novels were always underpinned by the difficult realities of his own life.

Jed Perl

Reimagining the Ordinary

The French artist Jean Hélion approached painting with a philosophical precision, each style a hypothesis to be investigated and tested.

Jean Hélion: La Prose du monde

an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, March 22–August 18, 2024

Michael Gorra

A Story of His Own

Percival Everett’s James retells The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective, showing a world hidden from Mark Twain’s white characters.

James

by Percival Everett

Edward Salem

X Days Since the Genocide Began

a poem

Fintan O’Toole

Like ‘Being Friends with a Hurricane’

For the fixers, enablers, and vassals who surround Donald Trump, the rewards of his friendship are not worth the risks.

Natasha Wimmer

The Watercolorist

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

The Novices of Lerna

by Ángel Bonomini, translated from the Spanish by Jordan Landsman

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.

Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter

by Gary Saul Morson

Francine Prose

More Than Just Acknowledgments

Tommy Orange’s novels document the shifting balance between the blessings and curses of modern Native life, most of which have been in operation since long before the characters were born.

Wandering Stars

by Tommy Orange

There There

by Tommy Orange

Kenneth Roth