Why We’re Still Talking About the ‘Trauma Plot’
People will always experience terrible things, and many will want to write about them.
What to Make of Miracles
In a new book, Elaine Pagels searches for the narrative origins of Jesus’s most wondrous acts.
Hinge
A poem
The Chinese Communist Party’s Ultimate Taboo
Fang Fang’s newly translated novel uncovers the brutal, buried history of land reform in China.
The Best American Poetry of the 21st Century (So Far)
The 25 most consequential collections from the past 25 years
An Iranian American Rom-Com That Breaks the Mold
Mariam Rahmani’s debut novel is both charmingly familiar and totally unpredictable.
A Country Imperfectly Pulling Itself Together
Wildcat Dome’s characters can’t escape the calamities that marked their lives—and their country’s history.
Three Very Different Ways to Live Honestly
In Emily St. James’s new novel, three trans women figure out what life to live—and what to sacrifice for it.
The Danger of a Too-Open Mind
Perhaps being persuadable is overrated—at least if it means “coming to accept the unacceptable.”
What Shakespeare Got Right About PTSD
A new production of Othello foregrounds what the play’s earliest audiences recognized: the psychological costs of war.
The Life of the Mind Can Only Get You So Far
Michelle de Kretser’s intellectual coming-of-age explores the fissures between one’s ideals and reality.
It’s Hard to Change Your Mind. A New Book Asks If You Should Even Try.
The novelist Julian Barnes doubts that we can ever really overcome our fixed beliefs. He should keep an open mind.
Coalescence
A poem
The Last Great Yiddish Novel
Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters rescues a destroyed world.
The Rise of the Brown v. Board of Education Skeptics
Why some mainstream Black intellectuals are giving up on the landmark decision
The Literature of the Pandemic
Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of work that takes on COVID.
An All-Female Society, Pushed to Extremes
Novels about women’s communities tend toward utopian coexistence or ruthless backbiting. The Unworthy does something more interesting.
An Unabashedly Intellectual Murder Mystery
Cristina Rivera Garza’s newly translated novel evokes a mixture of numbness and anxiety in the face of incessant violence.
The Man Who Owned 181 Renoirs
Albert Barnes believed in the liberating power of art—but you had to look at it his way.
The Novel I’m Searching For
Five years after the pandemic, I’m holding out for a story that doesn’t just describe our experience, but transforms it.
The World Can’t Keep Up With Its Garbage
Trash dumping is taking a devastating environmental toll—especially on poorer countries.