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…

What to say about a novel whose point of view alternates between a so-called “IQ-challenged” narrator and a sentient tortoise? Such devices can be instant turn-offs for serious readers—they can smack of gimmickry and saccharine cuteness. Anthropomorphized animals and naive girls solving mysteries have so long been the province of children’s literature that it is difficult not to confront the text with…

Gore Vidal once described Moby Dick as “a very bad masterpiece,” and most readers will understand exactly what he meant. Notwithstanding the book’s mythic grandeur, that huge chapter on “the whiteness of the whale,” for instance, has to be one of the most indigestible bits of fiction ever written. It was in the same spirit as Vidal’s observation that the LRC editorial staff planned this December’s holiday…