Sigrid Nunez

A Hero for Cro-MAGA Times

Charles Baxter’s new novel follows the moral travails of a rock-steady insurance salesman in a dystopian Ohio backwater.

‘An Archaic Country,’ Dark and Bright

A new collection of stories by the novelist Ludmila Ulitskaya celebrates the women of Russia, countering the frequent bleakness and tragedy of their lives with tenderness and optimism.

Gored in the Afternoon

Annie Ernaux, the 2022 Nobel Literature laureate, has published a diary of a sublime love affair—both a quest for self-awareness and a desire to escape the self—in which she traces a familiar arc of loss.

The Lady Vanishes

The narrator of María Gainza’s new novel tracks a forger in the counterfeit art world of Buenos Aires as part of an effort to authenticate herself.

But I Was Young and Foolish

Hermione Hoby’s Virtue is a recent coming-of-age story in which her protagonist, burdened with guilt and yet blessed with psychological acuity and a Nabokovian eye for beauty, reflects ruefully on his young life in New York.

‘Lost, at Sea, at Odds’

Jhumpa Lahiri wrote her new novel in Italian, her adopted language, but the greater challenge in Whereabouts was to write about a chronic depressive with seemingly no deep passions or significant relationships.

Disorders of the Heart

In her new story collection, Nicole Krauss is at her strongest when she sets aside sensational plot devices and chronicles the everyday.

Sex and Sincerity

What happens when someone sets out to write fiction that is “100 percent pornographic and 100 percent high art”?