Category: Essays

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The Mainstreaming of Historical Fiction

Historical fiction is suddenly everywhere. It’s on the bestseller list, in college classrooms, and probably on the lap of the woman sitting next to you on the train. A genre that at one point felt maligned and boring—neither serious nor sought after—has undergone a full-on transformation. In just the past few months, some of the most anticipated new releases by contemporary literature’s most beloved authors have been historical, including Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds, Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, and Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend. Read more

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Literature Machines

The Italian novelist Italo Calvino was unusually optimistic about the invention of a “literature machine.” In his 1967 essay “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” he imagines a computer that would be “capable of conceiving and composing poems and novels,” bringing to the page what humans “are accustomed to consider as the most jealously guarded attributes in our psychological life.” For him, literature is simply “a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities implicit in its own material, independent of the personality” of the writer. When read today, Calvino’s predictions—“provocative and even profane” at the time, as he admitted—seem eerily prescient. Read more

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Literary Fiction is Dead, Long Live Literary Fiction!

As an English professor, I’m often asked, “What do you like to read?” Sometimes I answer, “Literary fiction.” By that phrase, I mean fiction that privileges art over entertainment. I did not know until recently that literary fiction—the phrase, not what it stands for—grew up with me. We’re about the same age. And while I hope I’m only midway through my life, literary fiction might be dead. More precisely, what might have died is literary fiction as a meaningful category in publishing and bookselling. Read more

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China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future

This conviction of history’s importance is driving a national movement of underground historians that has slowly taken shape over the past 20 years. I call these people historians as a shorthand for a broad array of China’s brightest minds: university professors, independent filmmakers, underground magazine publishers, novelists, artists and journalists. Some might be thought of as dissidents, but most have one foot inside the system, where they continue to hold jobs, own property and raise families. All of them risk their careers, their futures and prison to publish clandestine journals, banned books and independent documentary films. Read more

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