fiction
“Six years after being declared the ‘worst of the worst,’ the men had been found to be, well, not so bad. They were free to leave The Prison, but they had nowhere to go.... The tiny island would swallow an outsized problem and, everyone hoped, not choke on it.”
Amy Waldman
“Like Nitasha, the palm had strange growth patterns. During the divorce, it shot up happily, but when her father returned to Jaipur, remarried, and began exporting blood diamonds, its growth was stunted. It survived two hurricanes, Ewa and Iniki. The palm would not die.”
Shivani Manghnani
“Aukse stems from the word ‘gold’ in Lithuanian. When she was born, Aukse’s hair was a golden fuzz, her cry a loud song. Her mother told her friends, ‘My daughter will be an opera diva.’ Her daughter, born in America, daughter of promise.”
D.S. Sulaitis
“I was tempted to take his shirt with me, a keepsake from the summer when I took my life apart, piece by piece, like someone unsolving a puzzle.”
Laura van den Berg
Neel Mukherjee,
art by Tom Uglow
“Yellow. That's the color of paint I had on my brush when I got the news about my father's suicide. Yellow. And not a green–yellow like the earth, and not a blue–yellow like the sea. I was using a golden–yellow like the sun.”
Kristin S. vanNamen
“Her eyes watch as the words curl out of her mouth. Her eyes watch as her thumb and forefinger dart and rush after her words to catch them. She is picking her words out of the air. Her mouth opens and closes. She mouths. She jaws. She is word–gathering.”
Gay James
“We had heard that these sorts of games were dangerous,
that if we were to become part of local legend, if other girls were to keep watch over us,
one of us must level out with the top of the set, then catapult over the chain–link to the
street on the other side, land in a heap of wasted child–body, lie in rivers of blood.
Be gone.“
Danielle Lazarin
“We were at the nude beach one cloudy afternoon when he was thinking it all over out loud. I was topless and Diego was completely on display, which, looking back, should have been awkward for us, but it wasn’t.”
Patricia Engel
“I imagined what I'd like to do to him, and
everyting I imagined I'd do made blood. I mean real blood. I'd made blood
happen in the past. Not gun blood, not bullets, not knife wounds. I wasn't a killer. But broken teeth, yes, absolutely.”
Dagoberto Gilb
essays
Patrick French’s extraordinary authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award
James Wallenstein
Remembering Thomas Disch, an author “haunted and vivified by the apocalyptic.”
John Crowley
Edward St. Aubyn takes on the English upper class
Neel Mukherjee
On the Booker Prize–winning The White Tiger and authenticity in the South Asian political novel
Amitava Kumar
Leslie Epstein’s magic
John Crowley
Fiction’s New Terrain
Stacy D’Erasmo
An interview with Vivian Gornick
Rebecca Tuhus–Dubrow
Writing the Troubles
Roger Boylan
Flann O’Brien’s Triumph
Roger Boylan
Imagining justice in Palestine
Elias Khoury
Becoming human in South Africa
Zakes Mda
The fantasy world of John Cowper Powys
Roger Boylan
Ha Jin’s A Free Life
Mythili G. Rao
Notes on Bulgarian literature
Dimiter Kenarov
The mid-century novels of “the other Elizabeth Taylor”
Neel Mukherjee
archive
Read Stewart O’Nan's 1999 article which renewed public interest in Richard
Yates's literary career. The film version of Revolutionary Road
appeared late last year.
