EssayMrs. Dalloway's Midlife Crisis
Virginia Woolf’s wild run of creativity in her 40s included writing her masterpiece on the terrors and triumphs of middle age.
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.
ProfileYou Are Going to Die: A Profile of Oliver Burkeman
Oliver Burkeman has become an unlikely self-help guru by reminding everyone of their mortality.
EssayWelcome to Stucktopia
Pop culture is serving up dark visions full of labyrinthine bunkers, endless loops and characters who feel hopelessly mired. Welcome to…
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.
ProfileThe Second Coming of Miranda July: A Cover Story
A cover-story profile of Miranda July on reinvention, appetite, and All Fours.
EssayThe Germans Who Stood Up to Hitler: An Essay on Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone
And the Germans who didn’t
ReviewMatt Lauer's Accuser Complicates Her Story
Brooke Nevils’s memoir is also a reckoning with many misconceptions about #MeToo narratives.
ProfileA Profile of Catherine Lacey
A writer invents the ultimate fun-house novel for her exploration of biography and art.
ProfileLucy Liu: At Face Value
In Issue 10 of Mother Tongue, writer @hillarylouisekelly meets the inimitable @lucyliu, and encounters a woman at the height of her…
ProfileWoman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: a Profile of Mary Bronstein
The daring director on her unabashed new motherhood film, If I Had Legs I'd Kick You
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.
ProfileCloser to Fine: A Profile of Amanda Knox
“Before spending the day with Amanda Knox, I’d never met someone about whom I had already been told so many untrue things,” writes…
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.
ProfileHanif Kureishi's Relentlessly Revealing Memoir
How a tragic accident helped the author find his rebellious voice again
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.
EssayThe Art of Putting on Airs
In the 21st century, you are who you pretend to be. It’s a world Tom Ripley was made for.
EssayThe Eternal Scrutiny of Kate Middleton
Why people feel entitled to the Princess of Wales’s whereabouts
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.
EssayA Memoirist Who Told All and Repented Nothing: An Essay on Diana Athill
Where Diana Athill excelled was at admitting, sans complaint or self-recrimination.
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…
ProfileThis Woman's Work: A Profile of Olga Ravn
A profile of the Danish novelist whose books make motherhood and work strange again.
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.
ProfileHilary Mantel Thinks the Last Book is Her Best: An Interview
“I’ve always been very ambitious. But it’s more in my own terms than in other people’s terms.”
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…
ProfileRivka Galchen's Unsettling Powers: A Profile
Her new novel is about a vicious, real-life witch hunt—and she somehow still managed to make it funny.
EssayThe Age of Innocence at a Moment of Increased Appetite for Eating the Rich
Edith Wharton’s novel, now a hundred, made its author wealthier than ever by offering up her own people for derision and envy.
ProfileIn Case of Emergency, Read Olivia Laing: A Profile
From The Lonely City to Funny Weather, the author writes to find a path forward through pain.
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.
EssaySeverance Predicted the Slow-Burn Performance of Our Pandemic
Like Ling Ma’s protagonist, we haven’t been shot out of a cannon and into a new world. We’re watching it unfold like a digitally broadcast…
ProfileThe Disaster Artist: A Profile of Emily St. John Mandel
Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is speaking to our pandemic-frenzied moment. Her new book is even bleaker.
EssayWhy Emma Is Still Jane Austen's Most Pleasurable Heroine
Go ahead. Judge the hell out of her. That’s the point.
ProfileJenny Offill Wrote the Perfect Worry Novel: A Profile
In Weather, the author takes us through the Five Stages of Climactic Grief.
EssayWe're All Amy
The Little Women character has served as our national totem of spoiled little turds for 151 years, as if we didn’t all yearn to be her.
EssayGone Boys: The Rise of Female Writers in the Aughts
Where are the Jonathans of yesteryear? Female authors dominated the 2010s, and replaced the Great American Novel with something better.
ProfileWhat's Scarier Than Motherhood?: A Profile of Helen Phillips
In Helen Phillips’s The Need, a parent’s nightmares take the form of a home intruder — who looks exactly like her.
ProfileSusan Choi Complicates the Plot: A Profile
How rage and the Access Hollywood tape inspired this spring’s most inventive and polarizing novel.
ProfileThe Bookstore That Became the Face of a Movement
A.N. Devers opened the Second Shelf to change how we talk about (and pay for) rare books by women.
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.
EssayThe Villainous Bitch Has Become the Most Boring Trend in Literature
We wanted unlikable narrators; we got an army of psychopathic she-beasts too shallow to hate.
Essay25 Years Ago The Virgin Suicides Kicked Off the American Obsession With Teenage Tragedy
Jeffrey Eugenides’s haunting, faux-nostalgic 1993 novel changed the way we consume adolescence in pop culture.