fiction

• 
• SOURCE: The Nation
  6/21/2023
  

  Cormac McCarthy's Brutal Allegories of the American Empire

  by Greg Grandin

  "McCarthy demonstrated how the frontier wasn’t an incubator of democratic equality but a place of unrelenting pain, cruelty, and suffering."

• 
• SOURCE: Slate
  5/21/2023
  

  Why Historians Love Comparing Themselves with the Great Detectives

  by Carolyn Eastman

  The best point of comparison between Holmes and historian isn't in solving the case but in the struggle to make sense of the facts. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  2/12/2023
  

  Margaret Atwood: Go Ahead and Ban My Book

  The novelist responds to the recent banning of "The Handmaid's Tale" by a Virginia county with assurances that forbidden knowledge has never been suppressible. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/13/2023
  

  Three Novels Rooted in Forgotten Black Histories

  Novels by Kai Thomas, Jamila Minnicks, and Nyani Nkrumah tell stories of Black life at the Canadian end of the Underground Railroad, an all-Black town in 1950s Alabama, and in post-Civil Rights Mississippi. 

• 
• SOURCE: New Statesman
  10/26/2022
  

  The Moral Corruption of Holocaust Fiction

  A popular book for young readers strips the Holocaust of its horror, and its victims of their Jewishness in favor of banal lessons about empathy and kindness. 

• 
• SOURCE: L.A. Progressive
  7/23/2022
  

  Can Fiction Like "The Ministry For the Future" Guide Real Action on Climate?

  by Walter G. Moss

  Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 novel has impressed readers from Bill McKibben to Barack Obama – does it model a better approach to the global climate crisis? 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  5/13/2022
  

  Margaret Atwood: I Created Gilead, but the Supreme Court Might Make it Real

  "Women were nonpersons in U.S. law for a lot longer than they have been persons. If we start overthrowing settled law using Justice Samuel Alito’s justifications, why not repeal votes for women?"

• 
• SOURCE: Contingent
  2/4/2022
  

  Man of Smoke

  by Jason Ridler

  The task of literary biography can be made much more difficult when authors fictionalize the sparse details of their own lives. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  5/6/2021
  

  The Epic Journey to ‘The Underground Railroad’

  Director Barry Jenkins struggled with the ethical implications of making entertainment out of the brutal events narrated in Colson Whitehead's novel "Underground Railroad." He discusses how he decided to go ahead with the miniseries adaptation anyway. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/20/2021
  

  Richard Wright’s Newly Restored Novel Is a Tale for Today

  by Reginald Dwayne Betts

  Reginald Dwayne Betts reviews the newly-published "The Man Who Lived Underground," which speaks as much to today as it does to the 1940s. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/11/2020
  

  Stories of Then That Still Hold Up Now

  Margaret Atwood, Héctor Tobar, Thomas Mallon and Brenda Wineapple on older political novels they admire that have a lot to say about the world today.

• 
• 6/28/2020
  

  “A Very Different Story”: Marian Sims and Reconstruction

  by David B. Parker

  Marian Sims's 1942 historical novel Beyond Surrender was not nearly as popular as Gone with the Wind. But it reminds us today of a history that might have been--both during Reconstruction and in the popular portrayal of the period.

• 
• 7/7/19
  

  Fictional History, Patriotism, and the Fight for Scottish Independence

  by LuAnn McCracken Fletcher

  As promoters of Scotland as a tourist destination continue to embrace “tartan heritage” in an effort to support Scotland’s important tourist industry, they unwittingly reinforce a version of history that serves the purpose of political propaganda, rather than disseminating a nuanced understanding of Scotland’s past. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Guardian
  1/5/19
  

  Tinker, tailor, Marxist academic… how Le Carré angered Historian Eric Hobsbawm

  A new biography reveals the Marxist intellectual asked the author why MI5 man in A Perfect Spy had a name so like his own.

• 
• SOURCE: TomDispatch
  12-10-13
  

  Why Doesn't War Appear in Modern American Fiction?

  by Beverly Gologorsky

  It's all about social class.

• 

• Jim Cullen: Review of Mohsin Hamid's "How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia" (Riverhead, 2013)

  Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His new book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, was recently published by Oxford University Press. Cullen blogs at American History Now.How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia solidifies Mohsin Hamid's claim as a major contemporary novelist. It showcases what have become a familiar set of gifts, among them a compelling voice, a keen feel for structure, and, given his literary sensibility, a surprisingly efficient narrative drive. Like his two previous books, Moth Smoke (2000) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), this one is brief. And yet in the space of less than 230 small pages he renders an entire life that seems simultaneously rich in detail and resonant as a fable.