Aldous Huxley is one of those writers people think they’ve solved after reading one book. And, to be fair, Brave New World is a pretty convincing introduction. It’s sharp, memorable, endlessly quotable, and so absorbed into cultural shorthand that “Huxley” can start sounding less like a writer’s name and more like a warning about where…
I don’t think Roberto Bolaño is a writer people read in a calm, orderly way. You can discuss him calmly, maybe. You can teach him calmly, assign him, historicize him, line up the usual phrases: exile, violence, poetry, failure, drifting men, literary obsession, fascism, Mexico City, Europe, the whole ruined republic of letters. All of…
One of the things I love most about Mexican literature is that it almost never lets the past sit quietly in the background. Even when a novel looks, at first glance, intimate or domestic or contemporary, something older is usually already in the room. The dead are nearby. Family history is doing damage in real…
Ranking Salman Rushdie is really a matter of deciding which kinds of excess you’re willing to trust. I don’t mean that as a joke. Or not only as a joke. Because once you get past the obvious summaries — the verbal fireworks, the historical sweep, the satire, the mythology, the formal swagger, the sheer unstoppable…
A lot of people pitch Lolly Willowes the same way, and to be fair, it’s a very good pitch. It’s a feminist classic. A witch novel. A sly little masterpiece about a woman refusing the life her family has arranged for her. All true and useful. But it doesn’t quite get at why the book…
Ranking Joan Didion sounds easy. At first, you think: fine, put the famous essay collections near the top, place Play It as It Lays somewhere high because it’s obviously too cold and brilliant not to be, make room for the grief memoirs, and try not to start a small civil war over whether The White…
A lot of writing about loneliness in Japanese fiction settles into the same set of props very quickly. Quiet rooms. Solitary meals. City lights. Emotional reserve. A person staring out a window while the weather does half the literary work. I get why that version sticks. Plenty of Japanese novels do handle loneliness with unusual…
Some novels might include a dream scene, while others can feel like they were built by a mind that no longer trusts daylight. That’s the territory I’m interested in here. Not the quick symbolic dream tucked into chapter seven. Not the tidy nightmare that foreshadows a death or confirms a fear. I mean books where…
Read a bit of Polish literature and you can jump from a big nineteenth-century realist novel full of class anxiety and social ambition to a book that treats adulthood like an elaborate humiliation ritual, then move into a contemporary novel where murder, astrology, William Blake, animal ethics, and a very stubborn narrator somehow all fit…
Ranking Dostoevsky is not an especially sensible exercise. You are not just ranking “good novels” in the usual way. You are ranking breakdowns, confessions, guilt spirals, ideological meltdowns, spiritual crises, and several hundred pages of people talking themselves into and out of catastrophe. Even his smaller books tend to contain at least one idea, monologue,…