The latest from the front lines of literature

Sympathy for the Bureaucrat Karen Olsson On Writing

I never intended to take on the Iran-Contra affair. My characters dragged me into it. I'd been writing about a woman in her thirties named Helen Atherton who returns to her hometown of Washington, D.C., and as the story took shape I perceived that her father, Tim, had worked as a bureaucrat and had lost his job as a result of a political scandal in the 1980s. From there it was a short slide to Iran-Contra. An actual scandal, one that remains mysterious to this day, seemed to me to be much richer than whatever I might've cooked up from scratch - fictional shenanigans at the Department of Commerce? Nothing like that could've matched the documented misadventures of certain Reagan administration officials in 1985-86. Read More...

The Big Green Tent Ludmila Ulitskaya Translated by Polly Gannon Excerpt

With epic breadth and intimate detail, The Big Green Tent tells the story of three school friends who meet in Moscow in the 1950s and go on to embody the heroism, folly, compromise, and hope of the Soviet dissident experience. Ludmila Ulitskaya's novel belongs to the tradition of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pasternak: it is a work consumed with politics, love, and belief — and a revelation of life in dark times. Read on...

The New York Times The 10 Best Books of 2015

We could not be more thrilled that four of our authors have made The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2015 list! A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin, Outline by Rachel Cusk, The Sellout by Paul Beatty, and One of Us by Asne Seierstad were among those works honored for their outstanding quality. Read on...