The too-familiar process by which the commercial mainstream comes to subsume always more peripheral cultural elements is one of Kunzru’s compositional black holes. The question of how to make art in c...

At the age of fifty-six, Robert Musil was already writing of his career in valedictory terms. That year he published the short prose collection Posthumous Papers of a Living Author in Zurich. It was ...

The opening of Joy Williams’s most recent novel, Harrow, welcomes the reader into a place somewhere between our world and the next. This is familiar territory to Williams, whose fiction has never sh...

Originally published in Polish in 2014, Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s magnum opus at last makes its way into English.

The Gaddis I like best to think of is a God-haunted aristocrat. Thrown pearl-clutching into a fallen world, he gathers himself and understands it as his task to recognize what instances of the eternal...

The writing of fiction premises a shared mooring in certain social facts. What happens when such consensus is dissolved—through fractionalization, the willful spread of lies, or the achievement of t...