• print • Summer 2023
    Mohammed Sami, Infection II, 2021, mixed media on linen, 82 5/8 × 71 1/8". © Mohammed Sami; Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Modern Art, London

    The Shape of Things to Come

    Hilary Leichter’s cantilevered narrative of love, time, and space • Fiona Maazel

    REMEMBER WHEN THE worst thing was death? AIDS, cancer, COVID—a horror for the people who died (are still dying) and a massive source of anxiety for the rest of us. And yet as my daughter and I waited out lockdown—fwiw, my daughter in this context represents the zeitgeist—she never once worried about us dying from COVID. Nope, she’d already assimilated death anxiety into her shelf of bedtime reading, the old standards. Instead, her fear had stepped up and out on a ledge overlooking apocalypse. Climate change. The end of everything. Extinction. 

    Hilary Leichter’s second novel, Terrace Story,

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  • print • Summer 2023
    Ridley Howard, Walking, Clouds, 2022, oil on linen, 50 × 60". Courtesy of the artist and Marinaro Gallery

    Come as You Are

    Annie Ernaux’s book of sex, writing, and selfhood • Jamie Hood

    I WAS SEVENTEEN AND IN MY THIRD YEAR OF FRENCH when I learned the phrase la petite mort: “the little death.” The boy in class I had a crush on—what was it he called himself? Roland, Jean-Pierre, Henri?—informed me, whispering so Madame Chrétien wouldn’t overhear us, that it was meant to describe an orgasm, or rather (I discovered later, after experiencing more than the panicked fumbling of high school trysts), the untenanted feeling that comes after having had one. Of course, I thought, of course, great sex would be something like an annihilation of the self. In my diary, I wrote of my ache

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  • print • Summer 2023
    Jac Kritzinger, Boy A, 2012. Jac Kritzinger

    Endless, Nameless

    Maya Binyam’s novel of diaspora and forgetting • Omari Weekes

    IN HANGMAN, MAYA BINYAM’S engrossing and shrewd debut novel, the author cultivates a world in which many languages are spoken but few are understood. After twenty-six years, an unnamed narrator finds himself on a flight traveling from what seems to be the United States back to his African homeland. He has just listened to the man sitting next to him tell a story about his life when a flight attendant asks if he would prefer tea or coffee. Though it is a routine question, she must switch languages for him to realize that he has a preference: coffee. With that settled, she asks, again in multiple

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  • print • Summer 2023
    Thomas Street, Dublin, Ireland, July 4, 2012. William Murphy/Wikicommons

    Bleak House

    Paul Murray’s novel of a downwardly mobile family in post-crash Ireland • Lisa Borst

    THE DUBLIN-BORN NOVELIST PAUL MURRAY, who entered adulthood during Ireland’s rapid modernization in the 1990s, writes fiction about the problems that modernity everywhere has failed to solve. His characters come up against cruelty and abuse, inequality, grief, terrible loneliness, death—but generally their problems boil down to one of two sources, their families or their money. Murray’s 2010 boarding school–set bestseller, Skippy Dies—with its fucked-up children of sick or divorcing parents, its neatly bidirectional line between the traumas of childhood and the disappointments of adulthood—tilts

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  • print • Summer 2023
    Tala Madani, The Primitive, 2015, oil on linen, 18 × 16". Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

    Are We There Yet?

    A madcap novel of national grief swerves between Reconstruction and the Obama era • Angelo Hernandez-Sias

    LORRIE MOORE’S NEW NOVEL STARTS TWICE. The first chapter is a letter from one sister to another, an old one, probably, because who writes letters anymore and I don’t even know what a “desk cartonnier” is but it sounds old. I can’t quite place the year or state but the period and region are clear: the Reconstruction South. “I have also sent Harry some old rebel coins for pounding into cufflinks,” our narrator, an innkeeper named Elizabeth, writes, as if to say, There will be no Confederate relics in my lodge. Canadian coins, oddly enough, circulate, but one senses that Elizabeth is speaking of

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  • print • Summer 2023

    Diary of a Reducer

    Henry Bean's lost classic novel of a man in search of a muse • Mina Tavakoli

    ONE STURDY WAY TO UNDERSTAND WRITER and director Henry Bean is as a specialist in the study of extremely bad behavior. His best subjects are the worst: self-hating havoc-wreakers, or the “I Suffered Complicated Trauma and Now the World Has to Deal With It” type. Populating his catalogue of asshole picaresques—rich with vicious couplings, drunken confrontations, alfresco autoeroticism—are a secretly Jewish neo-Nazi played by a skinhead Ryan Gosling (The Believer, 2001), a sledgehammer-and-baseball-bat-wielding vandal (Noise, 2007), a sexy serial murderess (Basic Instinct 2, 2006), and the

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  • print • Summer 2023
    Pavlina Alea, Neos, 2022, acrylic on linen, 48 × 72". © Pavlina Alea, courtesy of the artist

    True Grift

    Emma Cline’s novel of a sex worker who’s never off the clock • Jane Hu

    WHEN WE FIRST MEET HER, Alex is adrift—literally at sea, floating perilously farther away from shore. “What would they see if they looked at Alex?” she wonders, gazing on the rest of the beachgoers. “In the water, she was just like everyone else.” 

    At first glance, Alex appears like any other young woman enjoying a day at the beach, her “thin brown hair cut at her shoulders.” Alex had learned early on “that she was not beautiful enough to model,” but was “tall enough and skinny enough that people often assumed she was more beautiful than she was. A good trick.” At twenty-two, she is still

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  • print • Summer 2023
    Stasi surveillance equipment, DDR Museum, Berlin, Germany, 2013. Adam Jones, Ph.D./Wikicommons

    After the Fall

    A novel about East Germans situates romantic feelings within the confines of the state • Janique Vigier

    IT WAS THE FALL of the Berlin Wall that prompted Jenny Erpenbeck to become a writer, as if the beliefs and structures guiding her life that had, almost overnight, been rendered obsolete, could be recuperated by language. But Erpenbeck, born steps from the Wall in 1967, wasn’t interested in memoir or commemoration. She preferred tricks of self-effacement, recursion, deferral, anything that lent “freedom from the compulsion of realism.” Her debut, The Old Child (1999), is a parable of a loser’s triumph: a young woman posing as a fourteen-year-old goes to live in a children’s home, turning life

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  • review • December 29, 2022

    Real Scary

    Mariana Enriquez’s horror novel of 1980s Argentina • David Kurnick

    The Ishiguro blurb (“The most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time”) might be designed to entice skittish readers of literary fiction into committing to six hundred pages of horror. Who better than the SF-dabbling Nobel laureate to assure us that we can indulge our genre pleasures and remain serious people? Mariana Enriquez’s Our Share of Night, her first novel to be translated into English, comes well weighted with prestige-ballast: the novel won the 2019 Herralde Prize awarded by the Spanish publishing house Anagrama, and her second story collection, The Dangers of Smoking

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  • print • Dec/Jan/Feb 2023
    John le Carré and his half-sister Charlotte Cornwell, ca. 1956. By kind permission of the Cornwell family

    Cold Snap

    The correspondence of spy-turned-novelist John le Carré • Christian Lorentzen

    BORN DAVID CORNWELL in 1931, John le Carré was too young to go to war and thus too young to experience Britain’s patriotic struggle with Nazi Germany from inside the intelligence service, too young to have worked in alliance with the Soviet Union, and much too young to have been a university student in the 1930s, when many idealistic young Britons joined with the Communists because they were the staunchest opponents of fascism. He was sent to boarding school at the age of five, and it left him with a bitter feeling toward his country’s ruling institutions, even as he would remain thoroughly a

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  • print • Dec/Jan/Feb 2023
    Ellen Rundle, Blooming Barrel Cactus with Woodpecker, 2017, glazed stoneware, 11 × 6 × 6". Courtesy the artist.

    Just Deserts

    Lydia Millet’s novel of a privileged man’s transformation • Lily Meyer

    NOMINALLY, LYDIA MILLET’S TWELFTH NOVEL, Dinosaurs, takes its title from the birds that inhabit the Arizona desert in which the book is set. But it also refers to Millet’s protagonist Gil, a kind, aimless man in his mid-forties. Orphaned in early childhood, he inherited a fortune at age eighteen and, when we meet him, is both ashamed of being “disgustingly rich” and fixated on finding the single “best way to contribute.” He’s so terrified of doing wrong that he’s spent his adulthood doing little but clinging to an unhappy relationship, volunteering at a series of nonprofits, and yearning to be

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  • print • Dec/Jan/Feb 2023
    Colette, Paris, ca. 1907.

    Supreme Courtesan

    Colette’s classic novels of a prostitute and her young ex-lover • Becca Rothfeld

    “BEAUTY, WOMEN’S BUSINESS IN THIS SOCIETY, is the theater of their enslavement,” laments Susan Sontag in her 1972 meditation on aging and femininity. “Only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl.” It is no accident that women must look like girls to qualify as beauties, for they must also act like girls to qualify as women. “The ideal state proposed for women is docility, which means not being fully grown up,” Sontag continues. Only two ages are available to women: infantile—and too old. 

    No one understood the injustice of the girlish imperative better than the French writer

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