Marlon James, Dwight Garner, and the Non-Maximalist Maximalist Novel: On Marlon James’ The Disappearers

At the tail end of summer, Dwight Garner accomplished what few legacy media critics have since the days of Michiko Kakutani: he wrote a review that helped sell a book. A literary novel of more than 600 pages, no less. It was a conservative first printing. At 37,000 copies, Riverhead Books was not expecting a bestseller, despite the author’s previous Booker Prize-winning 2014 epic A Brief History of Seven Killings having sold half a million copies worldwide.

Out of School: On Min Jin Lee’s American Hagwon

The difficulty with writing a book as beloved as Pachinko is that following it is almost impossible. With her new novel, American Hagwon (2026), Min Jin Lee has done her best. The underlying strength of this third installment in a planned quartet about the Korean diaspora is Lee’s ambition. While the novel’s core theme is the obsession with education in Korean culture, it is also, in many ways, an immigration novel.

When Autofiction Gets Violent: On Eduardo Halfon’s Tarantula

In the early 1980s, an adolescent Eduardo Halfon, then living in Florida with his parents after fleeing the violence of the Guatemalan Civil War, returned to his home country to attend a camp for Jewish children. For the first few days, the experience was typical enough — expeditions into the forest, lessons in survival techniques, nights fitfully sleeping on a cot. Then, early one morning, Halfon and his companions were awoken by uniformed camp counselors with swastikas affixed to their arms.

The Great Wound: On Rachel Cusk’s Life of M

Something awful happens when you start to achieve a degree of success as a writer. All of a sudden, people sidle up to you at parties, stick up their hands at your readings, and ask questions about things other than your book. At first, all they really want to know about is your “writing process”: What kind of chair do you sit in? Do you have a favorite font? Do you line up your highlighter pens in a little rainbow every morning before you start?

The Oppressor’s Jokes Punch Up: On Jordy Rosenberg’s Night Night Fawn

In the first 10 pages of Jordy Rosenberg’s second novel, Night Night Fawn, the walls are already closing in on the novel’s narrator, Barbara Rosenberg. She is trapped in her cramped 14th-floor apartment on East 69th Street and Second Avenue — “an address in which, as everybody knows, there is no honor” — the same “shrunken little apartment every Striver-Jew . . . moved to by the 1960s,” where she has lived her entire adult life. She is dying of cancer, addicted to opiates, and her mensch husband, Stephen, is dead.

Fly Me to the Sun: On A. Natasha Joukovsky’s Medium Rare

Ironically, the Greeks and Romans were pretty goth. As a Roman tombstone tells us, “We are, and we were, nothing. See, reader, how quickly us mortals come from nothing and return to nothing.” Okay, maybe that’s a little long for a Hot Topic t-shirt, but how about this one? Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo — “I was not, then I was, now I’m not, I don’t care.”

Smells Like Spirit: On Adam Voith’s Recommended If You Like

Cards on the table: there is no God, and Christian rock cannot achieve greatness. Chances are you agree with the latter; to each their own with the former. John Jeremiah Sullivan, in his GQ classic “Upon This Rock” of 2004, claimed the genre had “excellence-proofed itself”: It’s message music for listeners who know the message cold, and, what’s more, it operates under a perceived responsibility—one the artists embrace—to “reach people.”

You End Up Right Back Here: On Richard Russo’s Under the Falls

Richard Russo fans will recognize some familiar markers of his fiction in his latest novel, Under the Falls. The setting is a landscape of physical, economic, and emotional desolation — Stone Mountain, a hardscrabble, down-on-its-luck upstate New York town where the old lakeside amusement park rides are dismantled and rusting. This is “a place that doesn’t yield many good outcomes,” where Russo’s characters are merely scrambling to survive. Unhappy as they are, they are mostly unwilling or unable to leave.

The Unrelenting Hoofbeats of the New Literature: On Caleb Caudell’s The Quarrymen

What is the state of American literature today? This loaded question never has an easy answer, and invariably the debate grows tedious, ideological and sociological combatants racing to their predictable corners, fists wearily raised. In my years as a novelist and columnist and now editor-in-chief of this publication, I’ve come to believe that large, conglomerate publishers care less about disgorging excellent literature than they once did — that this pursuit, for a variety of reasons, is less interesting to them.

Between Life and Death: On Tom Howard’s Invisibilia

The short story collection is a difficult and awkward form. It lacks the unity of the novel, and unlike a narrative that stands alone in a literary or cultural magazine, each story seems as if it should somehow be connected to the other stories around it. This, of course, is despite the fact that many of the stories in the collection will have already been published separately in the aforementioned magazines and journals.