Social Media Ideas for Literary Fiction

Fiction round-up: Prestige Drama by Séamas O’Reilly, Transcription by Ben Lerner, Offseason by Avigayl Sharp

WHAT happens when the medium becomes the message is the concern of fiction this summer. In Séamas O’Reilly’s Prestige Drama (Fleet, £14.99 (£13.49); 978-0-349-72789-9), the city o...

These Literary Mysteries Are the Best of Two Worlds

These literary mysteries combine lush prose with compelling plots and characters in one perfect package.

“The Readers,” by Ben Lerner

It would be one thing if I wrote fiction about Cromwell or aliens, but, given that my protagonists resemble me, how could I know you weren’t mixing us up?

5 Novels that blur the line between fiction and reality

Discover five mind-bending novels that blur the line between fiction and reality, challenging perception, memory, identity, and truth.

Where the Extraordinary is Ordinary

The supernatural is mundane in these must-read magical realism and fabulism novels, from historical fantasy inspired by Taino mythology to anticolonial spec fic.

7 Books That Blur the Boundary Between Fact and Fiction

Once, very stoned around a campfire, I asked my friends what fire was. One scientifically minded member of the group offered a dutiful-if-also-stoned explanation about chemical bon...

On Writing

“Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.”Continue reading on Go Into The Story »

Éric Rohmer’s Novel “Élisabeth” Is a Precocious Literary Triumph

Before he had any interest in movies, Rohmer was a writer, and his 1946 début is a fine-grained vision of small-town lives in prewar France.

IT WILL COME BACK TO YOU

There are two kinds of people in the world, said Søren Kierkegaard: those who write, and those who don’t. Nunez, best known as a novelist, writes up a storm with her first story, “...

Speculative Fiction: The Unreal is Not Escapist

Speculation about Canada’s lack of speculative fiction can be put to rest. Together, these works showcase how richly the genre thrives across the landscape of Canadian literature b...

LEARNING

Set in New York City, poet Bush’s novella follows Courtney, a teacher at a private preschool, over the course of one workday. Fresh off a “light nervous breakdown,” Courtney is con...

Home is where the art is: the rise of the epic domestic novel

Writing about home life doesn’t have to be humdrum argues the author of Natural Disaster – just look at world-spanning, taboo-shattering works such as Ducks, Newburyport and All Fo...

Call My Agent

With their blend of taste and market savvy, literary agents have been both invisible and necessary in contemporary American fiction.

Partita by Barbara Kingsolver

A spoiler-free review of Partita by Barbara Kingsolver, a memory novel built like a Bach suite about loss, music, class, and the long reach of a love that almost broke a life. Slow...

My Prairie Books

I write because I like writing. I like words and sentences. I like thinking about people. I want to understand the wicked as well as the good and the often mistaken majority in bet...

The Twenty-Year Novel: Harriet Clark on The Hill

If you’re deprived of a home, deprived of access to your family, you learn that, actually, being bound to others is the significant thing.

Very Necessary Qualifications of a Great Storyteller

Toni Morrison once lamented that people have been taught to think of a book as a mirror, when it ought to be a door. All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a s...

Romantasy and the Emotional Turn in Modern Fiction

Discover how the rise of Romantasy is shifting modern fiction away from complex plots and toward deep emotional interiority and structured character arcs. The post Romantasy and th...

No One

“Land,” Reviewed

Why read historical fiction? A new novel by the author of “Hamnet” offers one answer: because it’s fun.

Being a Novelist Only Costs Romantic Compromises and Debilitating Debt

An excerpt from Famous Men by Julie Buntin At the Selden Awards, you’re Nathaniel’s guest, with your own seat at the best table. Two years and change, you say to the woman who asks...

The Limits of Willa Cather's Catholic Imagination

Amy Welborn on literature.

The Gothic Is a Gateway to Literature’s Most Enduring Themes

The Gothic is a genre with recognizable tropes: witches and vampires, haunted houses and cobwebby tombs. It’s eerie, it’s morbid, it’s campy and over the top. When I was writing my...

“Love and Death in the American Novel,” Reviewed

For the critic Leslie Fiedler, the country’s best and worst fiction was shaped by visions of escape from society—and therefore from maturity.