Vienna around 1900 is one of those places people love to picture. You get the standard mental slideshow of cafés, opera houses, polished manners, serious coats, excellent pastries, people saying devastatingly clever things over coffee while the empire hums along in the background. It’s a great image and I understand the appeal. If a city…
John Steinbeck is one of those writers a lot of people meet too early, in exactly the wrong setting. You read Of Mice and Men at a school desk. Or The Pearl, while someone tries to convince a room full of teenagers that symbolism is exciting if you say “symbolism” often enough. Or maybe The…
Once you’ve done the big Russian names, the next step doesn’t have to be “more of the same, but longer and snowier.” A lot of people come out of the standard Russian-canon doorway with a very specific picture in their heads: giant novels, moral anguish, murder-adjacent students, aristocrats ruining one another over tea, and at…
Lauren Groff is a writer whose sentences do not sit politely in the corner waiting to be admired. They lunge. They flare and they bristle. They can be lush, but the lushness usually comes with some force in it. Bodies in danger. Children at risk. Marriage turning weird under pressure. Animals watching from the edge…
When people talk about Cormac McCarthy, they usually head straight for the monuments. There’s Blood Meridian, the terrifying one, the one with Judge Holden looming through American literature like a philosophical plague. There’s The Road, the ash-covered father-and-son novel that made a lot of readers sit very still afterward and call the experience “beautiful,” which…
I love a giant postmodern novel as much as the next person who has willingly carried around a book large enough to count as upper-body training. There is a real thrill to those huge, unruly systems-novels. Gravity’s Rainbow should feel overloaded. Infinite Jest should feel recursive and slightly unhealthy. Underworld should feel crowded with history…
Don DeLillo is often talked about like a man who had a secret antenna installed somewhere in his skull. There’s the media static. The conspiracies. The terrorism. The celebrity culture. The markets. The screens. The academic absurdity. The fear of death humming beneath the supermarket lights. Read enough DeLillo and it can feel like he…
For many, South Korean literature arrives with something of an unexpected jolt. Maybe it’s The Vegetarian, where a quiet domestic premise turns strange and impossible to shake. Maybe it’s Human Acts, where history stops behaving like the past and starts pressing on the living. Maybe it’s Cursed Bunny, where capitalism, patriarchy, and general modern misery…
A lot of people know Vladimir Nabokov simply as the guy who wrote Lolita, a book that many people who haven’t read it have a strong opinion about. Of course he has a much different reputation amongst big literature fans who have actually read that book and more. But it’s still a complicated one because…
I think Kenyan literature is one of those traditions people might approach with their shoulders already slightly tensed. You can almost hear the imaginary assignment sheet rustling in the background: colonialism, language, Mau Mau, independence, betrayal, disillusionment, discuss. And to be sure, all of that matters. A lot. You cannot seriously talk about Kenyan literature…