The Problem with Utopias The history of utopian fiction proves that we can’t even imagine a better world. Ewan Morrison 23 May 2024 · 15 min read
China, the West, and The Three-Body Problem The themes of Liu Cixin’s trilogy undermine his protestations of loyalty to the People’s Republic. Jason Garshfield 15 Mar 2024 · 17 min read
Beginning in Gladness, Ending in Madness 1900–1950 was a golden age of literary eccentricity. Stephen Akey 21 Feb 2024 · 14 min read
The Great Napoleonic Novel “It’s a sin to want to die for a nation.” Josh Allan 16 Nov 2023 · 8 min read
Strange New Sci Fi If truth is the first casualty of war, then perhaps good fiction is the first casualty of culture war. Johnny Schmidt 21 Sep 2023 · 17 min read
We’re Still Waiting for a Great Post-COVID Pandemic Novel Fiction writers are used to working in lonely isolation. Maybe that’s why the stories they’ve written about the pandemic seem so out of touch Neal Pollack 30 May 2022 · 16 min read
We Can Revisit (And Even Replace) the Classic Books We Teach Children—Without Cancelling Them Allan Stratton 18 Mar 2021 · 15 min read
The Dishonest and Misogynistic Hate Campaign Against J.K. Rowling And it turns out that she was, because despite the best efforts of her critics, she hasn’t yet been truly cancelled. Louise Perry 18 Sep 2020 · 7 min read
The Conservative Manifesto Buried in 'Avengers: Endgame' If you haven’t seen Endgame yet—or if you take comfort in the delusion that Marvel is “woke”—stop reading now. Aaron Sibarium 14 Jun 2019 · 10 min read
On Its 70th Anniversary, Nineteen Eighty-Four Still Feels Important and Inspiring Nineteen-Eighty Four, whose first publication took place 70 years ago today, is itself a sort of anti-novel, one that undermines its own dramatic tension in a way that might now be described as postmodern. Jonathan Kay 8 Jun 2019 · 15 min read
The Case for Nabokov An even moderately careful reading of Lolita should make it quite clear that it’s anything but a “celebration” of child rape. Cathy Young 6 May 2019 · 13 min read
Policing the Creative Imagination If sensitivity readers become a publishing institution, they will only incentivize more cautious, conservative, and ideologically homogenous books. Craig DeLancey 5 May 2019 · 9 min read
Michel Houellebecq: Prophet or Troll? Houellebecq depicts a Europe where French culture is a bad joke. Jaspreet Singh Boparai 10 Apr 2019 · 14 min read
Young Adult Fiction's Online Commissars No Young Adult fiction writer is in danger of being shot, starved, or sent to work in the mines for political transgressions. Cathy Young 4 Feb 2019 · 9 min read