A new anthology reveals the perils and rewards of philosophical fiction.

The essays in “Bland Fanatics” trace today’s crises to a long history of violent colonial oppression.

Her newly reissued masterpiece “The Transit of Venus” gestures at vast and intricate political problems.

Writing about the experience of illness is a burgeoning genre. What kind of hope can it offer?

“A Promised Land” tells of a country that needed a savior.

On “Fake Accounts” and the problems of millennial fiction

How could someone so telegenic, so witty, and skilled in politics have missed out on higher office?

In a career of many flops, he laid claim to the outsized success of Marvel Comics.

A new collection of stories edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell explores the line between good taste and desire fulfilled.

A new book sorts through the controversies surrounding Alice Walker’s seminal novel.

After Charlottesville, the historian Joan Wallach Scott wanted to find out how societies face up to their past—and why some fail.

What if workers channeled their passion into organizing for better pay and conditions instead?

We live in a work-obsessed country that, at least according to the film and television we binge, hates work more than anything.

It has taken decades for his Century Cycle plays to reach the screen—but not for lack of interest.

A new book frames this country’s tendency toward state-sanctioned murder as a unique cultural inheritance.

A new history traces an anti-democratic politics of hate, repression, paranoia, and revenge to its origins.

Ayad Akhtar’s novel “Homeland Elegies” confronts a culture that expects Muslim Americans to explain themselves.

Eulogies for the creative class are premature. Art workers can organize—and survive.

Why is one of Turkey’s foremost novelists in jail?

Don DeLillo’s and Jonathan Lethem’s new novels imagine the end of electronic communication.