empire and critique
Many years ago I wrote an essay on the great Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe in which I looked at what I believed to be...
Tag: Fiction
22 Results
literary fiction and climate change, revisited
Here we have Siddhartha Deb making precisely the same inexplicable error that Amitav Ghosh, whom he quotes, made last...
the masterful diptych of Coroger Zelaznorow
It’s been very interesting for me to re-read — for the first time in 40 years, so who am I kidding, let’s just...
accommodation and perversion
I wrote recently that I see world-building in SF and fantasy as coming in two chief varieties, the speculative and the...
Ferrante’s tragedy
Once you are well inside the world of Elena Ferrante’s just-completed quartet — what English-language reviewers are...
presentism
No surprises here, of course, but when you ask people who teach creative writing in American universities what books...
on Aurora
My friend Adam Roberts, whose critical judgment is superb, loved Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel Aurora; I didn’t....
on difficulty
In this exchange on literary difficulty I think Leslie Jamison gives us something far more useful than Heller. Here’s...
brief book reviews: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
Natasha Pulley’s The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is a historical fantasy, set in late Victorian London, that seems...
Tav’s Mistake
Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves is a typical Neal Stephenson novel: expansive and nearly constantly geeking out over...