Here’s what you need to know: Tajja Isen’s lore runs deep. As coworkers at a now defunct digital magazine (RIP Catapult), I found myself constantly awed by her editorial vision and subtle humor, but it was her Wikipedia that really began to reveal the depth of her main character-ness. But even that hardly manages to scratch the surface. In her debut...

Around the world, it’s common for fiction writers to moonlight as translators. Even in places where there’s a robust network of governmental support for writers, translation work provides, at least in theory, a welcome injection of income. Since it’s difficult to make a living writing novels or stories, collecting an extra source of funding is important....

AudioFile recommends 10 excellent new audiobooks for spring, including masterful new works from Hanif Abdurraqib, Percival Everett, and more. Whether you’re looking for a memoir told in the author’s own voice or a fascinating novel performed by professional narrators, you’ll find something perfect for your next great listen. There’s Always This Year:...

“Tell me, my daughters,” says King Lear, announcing his intention to divest himself “of rule… [and] territory,” of “cares of state,” as he points to a map of his kingdom spread out before him. “Which of you shall we say doth love us most / That we our largest bounty may extend?” In attempting to take love’s measure, to size it up and apportion its...

Is Salman Rushdie an artist or a symbol? Can he be one but not the other? Or perhaps it’s an all-or-nothing affair and he is both or else neither. Ever since Rushdie, the author of 13 novels, was violently attacked onstage in August 2022 at a literary event, one line of thinking has it that his books should perforce be celebrated. The New Yorker embodied...

Death is one of the great literary subjects. It is also an essential narrative device, at once extreme and quotidian. How many stories hinge on either the escape from death or a fate worse than death? And when there is nothing left to happen, characters die. Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, subjected to every possible humiliation and degradation after his metamorphosis,...