Fiction Archive
A Lover’s Discourse by Xiaolu Guo
Xiaolu Guo’s new novel is a restless and mesmerizing portrait of the immigrant experience.
Jack by Marilynne Robinson
Robinson’s novels are like glaciers. They move slowly, but they leave behind a transformed landscape. In the vast and complex landscape of American novel-writing, Marilynne Robinson’s is a unique and indispensable terrain.
The Caretaker by Doon Arbus
Doon Arbus’s debut is an enigmatic and necessary book, especially for those conflicted about the physical detritus accumulated over the course of a life.
Daddy by Emma Cline
Emma Cline’s new collection investigates the shadier corners of the human experience, exploring the fault lines of power between men and women, parents and children, and the past and present. Cline deftly interrogates masculinity and the fates of broken relationships, examining violence on both a societal and personal level.
Sisters by Daisy Johnson
Daisy Johnson’s new novel dissolves the borders between dreams and reality, presenting a radical portrait of identity. Rather than a constructed and fixed self, one that is as distinct as it is static, identity is fluid, multivalent, and porous: a person never stays themselves for long.
Many People Die Like You by Lina Wolff
Lina Wolff’s new story collection, translated by Saskia Vogel, addresses death with morbid humor and oddity—flings, murders, and a DIY porn channel—and leaves us to stave off death with morbid hopefulness.
I Hold a Wolf by the Ears by Laura van den Berg
Laura van den Berg is a writer of wonderous understatement. Her stories end with readers feeling they have Wile E Coyote’d their way off a cliff and are only now realizing there is no ground left beneath them.
Must I Go by Yiyun Li
Though Yiyun Li’s new novel contains the sketchy architecture of an intergenerational, historical novel, its rooms and stories remain more conceptual than actual . . . . Husbands and wives are easily swapped. The defiant workings of memory are more important than memories themselves. Lives are annotated rather than
Pew by Catherine Lacey
Catherine Lacey’s new novel questions what people are willing to do to protect their perceptions of peace. The answers may not be surprising, but when history is an endless horror show, why should we expect any different? What good is grace when people give it to themselves?
True Love by Sarah Gerard
Gerard’s novel is a fascinating read for anyone looking to understand the world we’ll inhabit when the smoke of the Trump era clears—in particular, the world that’s being left to young people.