Skip to main content

books

Insular, Controversial Picks for Nobel Literature Laureates

Jennifer Wilson The Nation
Next year, says the reviewer, the Nobel Committee for Literature should look beyond Europe. Despite the differences between awardees Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke, they both reflect a divided Europe as viewed only from within its borders.

books

Brecht’s Poetry: Angry or Evil?

Michael Wood London Review of Books
An extended ode to the revolutionary German playwright-genius Bertolt Brecht, whose exhaustive new collected poems exalt combating injustice while keeping faith in his fidelity to dissent.

Studs Terkel Made Oral History

Peter Dreier The Nation
Ten years after his death, Terkel’s voice is still a vivid part of our shared experience.

books

A Postcard from Ursula LeGuin

John Crowley Boston Review
An homage to the then recently deceased, superlative science fiction writer who encouraged the author, an apprentice novelist adrift in the publishing world, to be a better reader as well as an accomplished scribbler of exemplary fiction.

books

The Origin of Others

Samantha Fu LSE Review of Books
In this book, based on a series of lectures given at Harvard University in 2016, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison offers her insights into how discrimination and animus cross racial and ethnic lines occurs.

books

A Novel Tackles Capitalism and Boredom

Constance Grady Vox
In Ling Ma's debut novel Severance, a radically understated post-apocalyptic novel about boredom, the apocalypse looks a lot like another day at the office.
Subscribe to literature