My Near-Future Dystopia
Imagine a surveillance state powerful enough to incarcerate people for the wrong dreams. In 2025, it doesn’t feel like such a leap.
The Last True Private Realm
When our waking thoughts get transmuted into dreams, what do we learn?
Two Murder Mysteries’ Surprising Window Into Human Genius
Why novelists love to imagine great historical figures as detectives
They Dreamed of Hitler
A newly reissued book documents the dreams of Germans living under the Nazis, charting totalitarianism’s power over the subconscious.
What to Read to Wrap Your Head Around the Climate Crisis
These visceral reported accounts will help readers better understand the new ecological status quo.
Joan Didion’s Books Should Have Been Enough
The publication of the essayist’s private letters undermines a writer famous for her control.
1994
A poem
The Gleeful, Chaotic World of Underground Comics
Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan is full of unrestrained, devil-may-care attitude.
What Does the Literature of the Working Class Look Like?
A new entrant to the genre of workplace literature argues that even mundane labor shapes your identity.
Mario Vargas Llosa’s Question for the Trump Era
The Nobel Prize–winning novelist, who died this week, traveled through both literature and politics with a heedlessness you had to admire.
The Dark Weirdness of R. Crumb
The illustrator dredged the depths of his own subconscious—and tapped into something collectively screwy in America.
Who Are We, Really?
A new subgenre of literature explores what’s uncovered when you take away someone’s public-facing persona.
A Love-Hate Letter to Technology
Vauhini Vara’s new memoir critiques the web in a novel way, turning its products into a kind of poetry.
The Comic-Book Artist Who Mastered Space and Time
Jules Feiffer, who died in January, taught me many things, but one comic strip mattered most of all.
The New King of Tech
How Jensen Huang built Nvidia into a nearly $3 trillion business
What’s Next for America’s Largest Creative-Writing Conference
Trump’s executive orders have made it downstream to authors.
Who Needs Intimacy?
Influential novelists are imagining what women’s lives might look like without the demands of partners and children.
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.
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