literature - Quillette

Silhouettes on people on a hill, amid flowers, looking towards a futuristic city.

The Problem with Utopias

The history of utopian fiction proves that we can’t even imagine a better world.

Ewan Morrison

23 May 2024 · 16 min read

A still of John Braine speaking Black and white image, portrait, John in glasses.

Today, most of John Braine’s work is out of print and forgotten. But he was an underrated writer, unafraid to confront the complexities of masculine sexuality with terse precision, self-deprecation, and emotional candour.

Brad Strotten

13 Apr 2024 · 11 min read

Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Everett in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (photo by Michael Hoffman, 1999)

Against Agency

Attending to Shakespeare on his own terms may allow us to reclaim the erotic warmth that is latent in our human condition.

Marilyn Simon

4 Apr 2024 · 8 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

A Dense Thicket of Contending Visions

In his latest novel, Tom Piazza imagines the finest meeting of American minds never to have happened.

Matt Hanson

7 Jan 2024 · 6 min read

The Genocidal Imagination

Philosophies of human cruelty, from Sade to October 7th.

Pascal Bruckner

12 Dec 2023 · 21 min read

Robots, Rats and Hoverchairs: Three Dystopian AI Fantasies

Human beings need meaning, and a life in which all one’s needs were met by external agents would fail to provide it.

Stewart Slater

5 Dec 2023 · 9 min read

‘Augie March’ Turns 70

An Interview with Saul Bellow’s biographer Zachary Leader.

Riley Moore

22 Sep 2023 · 12 min read

Our Lost Classical Learning

The Western canon was not an unchanging set of texts, but an ongoing conversation that lasted thousands of years—enabling each generation to build on the intellectual heritage of the past.

Brian Kaller

5 Sep 2023 · 7 min read

Milan Kundera: The Nobel Prize for Literature Winner We Never Had

Few writers in our time were more committed to the novel or had more idealism about the heights the form could scale.

Robin Ashenden

11 Jul 2023 · 12 min read

Chaucer’s Bawdy Broad

More than six centuries after The Canterbury Tales first appeared, the Wife of Bath still has lessons to teach about love, sex, marriage, and—yes—feminism

Charlotte Allen

20 Jun 2023 · 24 min read

Kazuo Ishiguro and the Uncanny Cascade

We live in a transitional period, when the possibility of being duped by incomprehensible intelligences—and thereby duping ourselves—has grown exponentially.