Of all of the brilliant, moving, intelligent works humanity has produced, the one I was most interested in reading was an outrageous piece of sci-fi trash filled with gratuitous sex, profanity, mutants, and over-the-top gore. The book–presumably writ

1. In the Visitor’s Room of a prison in Oxford, at the table next to me, a middle-aged man in a turquoise shirt sips a cocktail through a straw; his face scrunches up with pleasure. The woman he is with leans in to whisper in his ear. He opens his ey

Is there art without obsession? Obsession is endemic to the human condition.  It drives creation like sunlight nourishes plants. If artists are observers of human follies and failings, then depicting obsession comes with the terrain.  Three recently

Narrative is back, and it’s wearing new threads. The post Narrative Is Back: On Rebekah Frumkin’s ‘The Comedown’ appeared first on The Millions.

“I have this feeling, that all it will take will be one moment, even a tiny moment.” When Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature I was slightly disappointed. I was a “Harukist”—over the preceding eight months, I had been religiously reading

I knew life with a baby would be radically different. I had been warned, and I had seen time and again how a baby could change a family dynamic. I prepared (as much as one can) for breastfeeding problems and colic and sleepless nights. But what I did

1. Once a conversation with an Australian friend surprised me; she told me that Haruki Murakami, the world-famous Japanese novelist, struck her as “very Japanese.” “But why?” I puzzled, thinking of the Western pop culture references sprinkled through

Did I enjoy these books? Though they don’t interest me now, I think I did enjoy them then. I was accumulating my 10,000 hours of reading practice. The post Remembering My Parents’ Bookshelf appeared first on The Millions.

1. Swept up in the wave of resignations and mea culpa that rolled through the literary establishment at the height of the #metoo movement late last year was Paris Review editor Lorin Stein.  Stein stepped down from his post on December 6, 2017, amid

This is an excerpt from  A Little in Love with Everyone: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home by Genevieve Hudson, part of the …AFTERWORDS series from Fiction Advocate.   1. Before Alison Bechdel became an award-winning cartoonist, she was a tomboyi

On the one hand, there is the world as we know it, the ground-level of human life and everything it entails: the whole arc of history, the transformation of our natural environment, nervous first dates over coffee. On the other hand, there is the rem

For Greene, the moralizing literary artist, the therapy of commercial fiction itself becomes an object of his moralizing.  The post Graham Greene’s ‘Entertainments’ and The Problem of Writing from Life appeared first on The Million

The first six titles from February are the first six titles this month as well. The post The Millions Top Ten: March 2018 appeared first on The Millions.

DeLillo is so famously and distinctively a writer who appeals to sentence-lovers, with all their blindnesses, hubristic ideals, and narrow-minded cerebrations. The post DeLillo, Lethem, and the Seductive Sentence appeared first on The Millions.

It’s a golden age for nonfiction, but what writers have gained in imaginative freedom they sometimes pay for in the long and demanding road to the finish. The new Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant awards $40,000 to writers at any career stage for the

Digest, Gregory Pardlo’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poems, begins with “Written by Himself”: “I was born still and superstitious; I bore an unexpected burden. / I gave birth, I gave blessing, I gave rise to suspicion.” His lines carry

Celebrating its eleventh consecutive year of honoring literature in translation, the Best Translated Book Awards is pleased to announce the 2018 longlists for both fiction and poetry (we announced the 2017 and 2016 winners here at the site). Announce

The first time she told the story of her recovery from alcohol addiction, Leslie Jamison recalls in her memoir The Recovering, an older man in the front row of the meeting where she was speaking started shouting: “This is boring!” Jamison is quick to

My mother announced that she was going to declutter: pare down the excess in her house. Much of this was, admittedly, boxes of mine and my sister’s that had been stored in her attic since we were children. She asked me to come over, sift through them

Each year, Wrestlemania offers the climax of various WWE storylines that have been at play. Will the underdog finally win the championship? Or will the dastardly villain succeed? Will someone from our past come back to save us? Will someone be betray

Agnon dedicated the last two decades of his life to writing about his hometown as a symbol of the world of eastern European Jewry destroyed in the Holocaust. Asked by a literary critic what he was trying to accomplish, he answered simply: “I am build

Derek B. Miller caught the eye of readers of The Millions with his 2013 debut novel, Norwegian by Night, lauded by Richard Russo in his Year in Reading and staying atop our Top Ten for months. The novel featured an octogenarian ex-Marine, Sheldon Hor

Douglas Light’s new novel, Where Night Stops, draws its striking power from the well of impurity. It’s a swift crime novel stropped to a lethal gleam by lyricism and imbued with Franz Kafka’s beetle-shaped shadows. It’s a brilliantly structured myste

1. Growing up, I developed my Spanish as a form of discipline. Spanish belonged at home, and English belonged at school. Only when my sister and I spoke did our bilingual conversation find itself walking in trepidation across the bridge we had built

1. “Cheap, aren’t they?” The white woman, a townie, smug in her brown and shabby cardigan, asks me this without prelude, not even a stereotypically British and blustery, “Fine day, isn’t it?” In point of fact, it is a fine day. I am 24 years old, a s

Here are seven notable books of poetry publishing in April. Eye Level by Jenny Xie An excellent debut. Xie is particularly gifted with precise description; I want to linger on these poems. “Phnom Penh Diptych: Wet Season” is masterful and patient, ex

1. I lived in Venice for two years, and I hated it. In conversations I used euphemisms and turns of phrase (among my favorite either you love it or hate it! and it’s a… difficult city), but I was lying through my teeth. I fucking hated it

We wouldn’t dream of abandoning our vast semi–annual Most Anticipated Book Previews, but we thought a monthly reminder would be helpful (and give us a chance to note titles we missed the first time around).  Here’s what we’re looking out for this mon