Charles Finch

Natalia Ginzburg, shown here in 1980, is the author of "Happiness, as Such," a powerful, 1973 novel released in a new English translation in 2019. Her book is one of many by women that helped to define the cultural moment.

If you weren’t reading women in 2019, you missed out on the best in fiction — from Lucy Ellmann and Edwidge Danticat to Susan Steinberg and Natalia Ginzburg

December 20, 2019 at 8:00 a.m.

At some point after the presidential election in 2016, I began to read many more novels by women than by men. It wasn't a choice made out of principle, or...

Review: ‘The Reservoir Tapes’ confirms Jon McGregor’s mastery

May 9, 2019 at 11:52 p.m.

One of the most justly famous passages in literature is the final paragraph of “The Dead” by James Joyce. It’s late on a winter evening in Dublin. Gabriel Conroy is...

Alan Hollinghurst sketches the evolution of gay rights in latest historical novel, ‘The Sparsholt Affair’

May 9, 2019 at 11:47 p.m.

One thing I suspect history will forget about our era is how breathtakingly quickly the decisive turn in the struggle for gay rights happened. It was like the famous pitch...

Review: ‘Winter’ by Ali Smith

May 9, 2019 at 11:45 p.m.

Marry in haste, repent at leisure. When “Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers in 1993 — awarded to the best of the prize’s 25 winners —...

Ursula K. Le Guin at 88: ‘No Time to Spare,’ erudite as ever

May 9, 2019 at 11:44 p.m.

Old age, that strange thing: the state to which almost all of us desperately aspire, and also the one we want to know nothing about until we get there, please....

Edward St. Aubyn’s ‘Dunbar’ is, well, tragic

May 9, 2019 at 11:42 p.m.

It's becoming difficult, alas, to ignore the chasm in quality between Edward St. Aubyn's quintet of autobiographical novels and the rest of his fiction. That goes for his new book...

Review: ‘Mrs. Fletcher’ by Tom Perrotta

May 9, 2019 at 11:38 p.m.

The case against Tom Perrotta makes its maker sound awful. And what's to dislike? Perrotta's fiction is smart, funny and fluid; it anatomizes contemporary suburban life in America with a...

Review: Smart, quirky writing a delight but not enough to sustain ‘The Idiot’

May 9, 2019 at 11:29 p.m.

Does anything have to happen in a novel for it to be good? The most fashionable novels of this decade — the plotlessly watchful products of the genre called autofiction,...

George Saunders’ remarkable first novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” imagines the death of Willie Lincoln and a haunted Abraham Lincoln.

Review: George Saunders’ remarkable first novel, ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’

May 9, 2019 at 11:27 p.m.

There's a bitter tang to the first 20 or so stories that George Saunders published, across three lauded collections between 1996 to 2006. They were brilliant — he won a...

Nami Mun, Don DeLillo and Walter Isaacson attend the 2012 Carl Sandburg Literary Awards dinner at University of Illinois at Chicago Forum. DeLillo's new masterpiece, "Zero K," is about a billionaire with aspirations for immortality and poses questions about our place in nature.

Buying a way past death: ‘Zero K’ by Don DeLillo

May 9, 2019 at 11:07 p.m.

There is this weird fact that we are not nature. Aren't the skyscrapers we build as natural, strictly speaking, as a rabbit's scrapes or a bee's hive? But no —...

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