ReviewWhy So Much Millennial Fiction Is Boring
The generation’s novels tend to focus on the flatness of modern life—but alienation doesn’t have to be dull.
ReviewThe Art of the Joyful Tearjerker
A new novel by the Hamnet author Maggie O’Farrell showcases her genius for infusing painful stories with flashes of pure bliss.
ReviewMatt Lauer's Accuser Complicates Her Story
Brooke Nevils’s memoir is also a reckoning with many misconceptions about #MeToo narratives.
ReviewShe Has No Autonomy. Can She Be Happy?
Kate Riley’s perceptive debut novel, Ruth, depicts the life of a woman in a repressive sect without an ounce of sanctimony.
ReviewFast Times and Mean Girls
What the great teen movies tell us about American adolescence
ReviewParenthood Cannot Be Optimized
Amanda Hess’s new book examines a surplus of experts and gadgets that promise to perfect the experience of raising children.
ReviewAn All-Female Society, Pushed to Extremes
Novels about women’s communities tend toward utopian coexistence or ruthless backbiting. "The Unworthy" does something more interesting.
ReviewThese Millennials Can’t Get Out of Their Head
In Halle Butler’s new novel, young people won’t stop pathologizing others—or themselves.
ReviewAn Antidote to the Cult of Self-Discipline
A new novel sees procrastination as one of the last bastions of the creative mind.
ReviewTana French Has Broken the Detective Novel
In her latest book, the crime novelist Tana French dispenses almost entirely with the elements of her genre.
ReviewHow to Spend Your Time Poorly
A new novel puts Henry David Thoreau at its center and reveals what he was really searching for when he went off to live alone.
ReviewA Review of Day by Michael Cunningham
Michael Cunningham's new novel, 'Day,' follows a New York family during the pandemic — and in its time-shifts feels like another homage to…
ReviewTolstoy Was Wrong About Happy Families
In "Loved and Missed," Susie Boyt presents the story of a woman raising a child, and the surprising reality of just how pleasurable it all…
ReviewWhat Kind of Nazi Was He?
In a new memoir, the grandson of a Nazi official wonders whether “passive resistance” to Hitler’s regime ought to be categorized as a…
ReviewWhat If All Men Disappeared and the World Was Just Boring?
A new feminist utopian novel imagines a world without men. The problem is they’re never really gone.
ReviewOn Trying to Create Art When the Baby is Crying
A new book explores several major “mother-artists” of the mid-to-late-20th century, and how they managed to be both.
ReviewTrust by Hernan Diaz
'Trust,' by Hernan Diaz, is a Rashomon-like concoction of four stories about a hollow great man — fascinating and assured, but ultimately…
ReviewYoung Mungo by Douglas Stuart
'Young Mungo,' Douglas Stuart's beautiful, brutal second novel after the Booker Prize-winning 'Shuggie Bain,' follows a gay teen romance…
ReviewA Novel That Reimagines Motherhood as an Animal State
In “Nightbitch,” having grown a body inside you also means growing fur, sharp teeth, and a taste for raw meat.
ReviewStation Eleven Finds the Sublime in the Apocalypse
This pandemic story’s winter 2021 debut seems almost perfectly wrongly timed, but that’s precisely what makes it so perversely satisfying.
ReviewOh William! by Elizabeth Strout
Strout's latest novel, 'Oh, William!,' her third about the successful and heavily burdened Lucy Barton, is somehow both exclamatory and…
ReviewNobody Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
The reigning poet of Twitter, also a memoirist, aims to capture the emptiness of social media, and then transcend it, in "No One Is…
ReviewLeave the World Behind: A Novel About the Disaster That Won't End
Rumaan Alam’s enthralling new book follows its privileged characters on a getaway to the Hamptons as the world crumbles around them.
ReviewIn Stray, Stephanie Danler Asks How a Victim Becomes a Perpetrator
The author of “Sweetbitter” has written a memoir about the pain she’s suffered from — and caused to — those she’s loved.
ReviewI Tried to Be Virginia Woolf
Katharine Smyth’s All the Lives We Ever Lived is both a literary tribute and a powerful debut of its own.