Culture
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…
Tag
novels
Culture
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…
Unsorted
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…
Culture
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…
Unsorted
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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Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” Is Extravagantly Superficial
Catherine and Heathcliff—now played by Robbie and Elordi—will prove each other’s undoing as well. Fennell teases out the tricky evolution…
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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…
Unsorted
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.…
Business
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,…
News
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…
News
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…
Culture
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…
News
“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…
Unsorted
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…
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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…
Culture
James Frey’s New Cancelled-Guy Sex Novel Is as Bad as It Sounds
The author page of “Next to Heaven,” James Frey’s new novel, breathlessly notes that Frey “was called America’s Most Notorious Author by…
Culture
In Praise of Jane Austen’s Least Beloved Novel
“Northanger Abbey” is the least beloved of Jane Austen’s six novels. It also appears frequently in university-level literature classes.…
Culture
In Daniel Kehlmann’s Latest Novel, Everyone’s a Collaborator
Can a historical novel be morally serious, even tragic, and also playful at the same time? For a writer of fiction, history is a dangerous…
Culture
Colum McCann’s Limp Novel of Digital Life
Have novels left anything unsaid about the internet of the past fifteen years? It feels as though they’ve exhausted the terrain, but…
Celebrity
Who millennials imagine when reading romance novels compared to Gen Z
A study has found there is a surprising difference in the famous faces millennial and Gen Z readers picture when reading romance novels.…