Fiction

Fletcher Knebel’s ‘Night of Camp David,’ re-released this week, is tamer than reality.

Alan Jacobs on the maps that guide writers and readers through fictional worlds.

Katrina Gulliver reviews ‘The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World’ by Sarah Weinman

Christine Rosen on the high fashion and low blows in ‘When Life Gives You Lululemons’

Ethan Epstein on imagining nuclear war with North Korea.

Cathy Young on looking at the passion and cruelty of the classic novel with contemporary eyes.

Evgenia Citkowitz’s The Shades, reviewed

Andrew Egger reviews Joe Mungo Reed’s ‘We Begin Our Ascent.’

Stefan Beck reviews Rachel Kushner’s ‘The Mars Room,’ a novel that probes the soul-warping effects of prison life.

He predicted the moment in which we find ourselves.

His latest novel is a romp through 17th-century New England.

Unreliable memories of a passionate affair and its aftermath.

A half-century after her death, Carson McCullers is best known for The Member of the Wedding, her 1946 novel about a motherless 12-year-old girl who watches the planning for her brother’s nuptials and feels distanced from the rest of the family. Adapted for stage and screen, McCullers’s story is…

B.D. McClay on 'Eternal Life,' the new Dara Horn novel that takes the long view of longing.

Is it perverse to find ghost stories relaxing, even restful? Compared with the grim realities of the news and the appalling horrors of the last hundred years, even such outstanding classics as M. R. James’s “Count Magnus,” Sheridan Le Fanu’s “The Familiar,” and Algernon Blackwood’s “The Listener”…

B.D. McClay on adultery, friendship, and the story of a life—a review of Sally Rooney's novel 'Conversations with Friends.'

In 1926, the British author Henry Green (1905-1973) published the first of nine novels that would gain him critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. His mother didn’t quite know what to make of them. She loved to read, but didn’t partake of much fiction, so wasn’t sure how to assess her son’s…

The campus novel is overripe for a renaissance. Because it will take a satirical rendering à la Lucky Jim—or perhaps dozens of them—to expose the painfully silly social politics of campus protest culture to the clarifying light of enough readers' wry, self-aware laughter. Unsurprisingly, few have…

Every year, during the bleak months of winter, I try to read some ghost stories. Since mine is a gentle, pacific nature, I prefer classic tales, mainly from the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Gruesomeness, in my view, ought to be kept entirely offstage. A reader’s imagination alone, under the…

We need to talk about Lionel Shriver. On September 8, the author of We Need To Talk About Kevin and several other novels gave the keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers' Festival. Shriver had wanted to talk about "fiction and identity politics," but the organizers asked her to talk about "community…

We need to talk about Lionel Shriver. On September 8, the author of We Need To Talk About Kevin and several other novels gave the keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers' Festival. Shriver had wanted to talk about "fiction and identity politics," but the organizers asked her to talk about "community…