Esi Edugyan

How to describe this utterly sui generis work? One might be more faithful to its accomplishment by describing what it is not. Which is: not quite novel, not quite diary, not quite memoir—though it has elements of all three. It is perhaps closest to a gathering of modern-day pensées or sketches, which, taken…

Historical fiction is as much about the present as the past. This has become something of a truism now. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible can be understood as a critique of McCarthy’s witch hunts, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke as an indictment of his country’s “neo-Vietnam,” the Iraq War. With The Plot Against America…