Reviews

Kelly Link’s Romantic Imagination

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Though Link’s stories often keep closer bedfellows with Karen Russell and Aimee Bender, her novel is pulpier and more bathetic, in some ways a piece of straight fantasy.
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Reviews

The Everyday Horror of ‘Other Minds and Other Stories’

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In someone else’s hands, these stories might be little more than typeset urban legends, the stuff of 2000s-era AOL email chains, but Sims renders them as something both terrifying and mesmerizing.
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Reviews

The Violent Truths of ‘Brutalities’

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The impulse to simplify the complicated nature of touch, argues Margo Steines, is not just an intellectual but an ethical failure.
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Reviews

The Truthful Distortions of ‘The MANIAC’

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'The MANIAC' is a kind of triptych, presenting us with the conception, painful birth, and exponential growth of the digital computer and its own disquieting offspring, artificial intelligence.
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Reviews

The Visionary Memoirs of Péter Nádas

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'Shimmering Details' is a delicate fusion, supplementing the high-modernist realism of Proust and Musil with an expressionist’s commitment to the distortions generated by strong feeling.
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Reviews

Play and Rules: On Megan Fernandes and the Poetics of Kink

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The poems of 'I Do Everything I’m Told' pursue an ever more perfect mode of submission.
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Reviews

The Searing Clarity of Hilary Mantel

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Mantel the essayist was eager for ideas, light on her feet, yet sharp as a raptor.
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Essays Reviews

Éric Vuillard Is Rewriting the Writing of History

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Vuillard doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that his quest for murky truths sometimes forces him to speculate.
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Reviews

Alissa Hattman’s ‘Sift’ Is a Post-Apocalyptic Prophecy

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'Sift' is a remarkable entry in the rich climate-change canon that already exists within the genre of speculative fiction.
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Reviews

Marie Darrieussecq Plumbs the Depths of ‘Sleepless’ Nights

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'Sleepless' might be one of the few original interventions on the topic of insomnia in the past 15 years.
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Reviews

The Detached Drama of ‘Lazy City’

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What does it mean to suffer when your pain is played out?
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Reviews

In Louisa Hall’s ‘Reproduction,’ Motherhood Is Otherworldy

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For Hall, the trouble is not that writers can’t find the words to describe their reproductive experiences but that their stories will always be inadequate.
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Reviews

‘Mobility’ Is a New Kind of Climate-Change Novel

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As its polyvalent title suggests, Mobility is both a classically-proportioned novel of social climbing and a harsh interrogation of the logic of our petroleum society.
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Reviews

‘Oh God, The Sun Goes’ Is Strange, Surreal, and Utterly Sincere

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Tremendously weird stuff. It’s wonderful.
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Reviews

The Orthodoxy of Paradox

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In 'The Rigor of Angels,' William Eggington posits that paradoxes are inextricable from knowledge.
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Reviews

Chloe Aridjis’s Night-Sea Journey

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'Dialogue with a Somnambulist' reveals a new anxiety: that enchantment, however necessary, will not be sufficient.
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Reviews

The Ambitious Anachronism of ‘The Fraud’

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We are to understand that a story with such disclosures could not be published in its time, but we might also feel it could not have been written then.
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Reviews

Scenes from a Literary Marriage

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'Wifedom' is less a biography of Eileen—or even a portrait of two halves of a marriage—than an indictment of a writer that Funder has ceased to venerate.
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