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There’s a lot to be said for a chilly book, which can be suitably evocative in the dead of winter. But with much of the United States trudging through seemingly endless weeks of gray skies and frigid temperatures, with only faint glimmers of relief in sight, sometimes you just need an escape. As you wait … Read more
Drawing the Same Woman for 40 Years: A Master Cartoonist Ages Alongside His Heroine
When Ione Skye was in middle school in the early 1980s, a group of popular, mean girls she calls “the Aprils” brought her — shy, bookish, not yet famous — into their intimidating fold. She was surprised they even knew her name. “Part of me wanted to punch the girls’ smug faces,” she writes in … Read more
The Haitian artist and writer known as Frankétienne, who published the first novel written entirely in Haitian Creole and who, as the nation’s foremost literary lion, refracted its chaos and disorder through art, died on Thursday at his home in Port-au-Prince, the nation’s capital. He was 88. The Haitian Culture Ministry announced the death. The … Read more
Novels have always reflected technology. How we write fiction changed after the invention of photography, radio, film and email. This month we look at two romance novels that make a strong case for what we might call the Instagram or TikTok voice, as well as a historical that reminds us that the past is not … Read more
CRUSH, by Ada Calhoun The love child of Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat Pray Love” and Carrie Bradshaw’s “Sex and the City” column, Ada Calhoun’s debut novel, “Crush,” tells the promising story of an unnamed Gen X woman whose husband, Paul, suggests she kiss a few other men to regain her “sparkle.” Slay, droned my rotted Gen … Read more
Defending a democratic Ukraine is crucial to the project of global freedom, he contends, and Putin’s influential brand of illiberalism cannot be confronted on friendly terms. Despite his book’s title, Vindman, a self-described neo-idealist and admirer of Tallis, spends much of “The Folly of Realism” criticizing old-school idealists. The American foreign policy establishment, he writes, … Read more
WHY, INDEED, HAVE writers been so drawn to the color? According to surveys, blue is by far the world’s most popular hue, regardless of geography or gender — mostly owing to our favorable associations with it, or so researchers posit. Not surprisingly, people love cerulean skies and aquamarine seas, moody gemstones — sapphires, lapis lazuli, … Read more
Writing a list of queer historical romances feels half like writing a manifesto and half like writing a eulogy. Here are the love stories we created; here are our voices and hopes and desires, when we were still allowed to openly name them. Queer literary history has never been simple — even the parts of … Read more
The majority of the books nominated for this year’s International Booker Prize, the prestigious award for fiction translated into English, are under 200 pages long. Only one is over 300 pages: Mircea Cartarescu’s 627-page “Solenoid,” translated by Sean Cotter. It is also one of the most high-profile novels on the list. Many literary critics have … Read more