Playing with Helpless Dead Puppets
‘Ragtime,’ E.L. Doctorow’s forgotten novel of Progressive Era New York, is a reminder of how much American politics have changed over the past century.
Josh Allan
· 9 min read
Fiction
A collection of 25 posts
The Best Kind of Political Art
Chimamanda Adichie’s new novel is refreshingly defiant of liberal orthodoxies.
Holly Lawford-Smith
· 7 min read
The Many Faces of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’
Alexandre Dumas’s novel is by turns an adventure story, a paean to bourgeois values, and a Greek epic. No wonder it continues to fascinate.
Stewart Slater
· 9 min read
A Violent History Obscured
South Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang’s literary experimentation thwarts rather than advances her professed concern for the suffering of everyone, everywhere, all the time.
Brad Strotten
· 7 min read
The Problem with Utopias
The history of utopian fiction proves that we can’t even imagine a better world.
Ewan Morrison
· 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
· 17 min read
Beginning in Gladness, Ending in Madness
1900–1950 was a golden age of literary eccentricity.
Stephen Akey
· 14 min read
The Great Napoleonic Novel
“It’s a sin to want to die for a nation.”
Josh Allan
· 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
· 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
· 16 min read
We Can Revisit (And Even Replace) the Classic Books We Teach Children—Without Cancelling Them
Allan Stratton
· 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
· 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
· 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
· 15 min read
Headline Rhymes
Graham Verdon
· 1 min read