At the start of Good Material, we meet Andy, a 35-year-old standup comic who is trying to get over a breakup and listing the reasons why he is better off without his... Read more »
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. David Means reads his story “Chance the Cat,” from the... Read more »
The premise is this. Piglet is in her early 30s and engaged to the ostensibly perfect Kit. The couple have recently moved into a new-build in Oxford, not far from Kit’s parents.... Read more »
Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel, The Vulnerables, emerges from the words of others. The first line comes not from the narrator herself, but from another work she now barely recalls. From there it’s... Read more »
When The Nix, Nathan Hill’s debut novel, hit the bookshops in 2016, you could almost hear the collective intake of breath. How could any writer produce such a multilayered, time-jumping, character-hopping, consistently... Read more »
Your story in this week’s issue, “Chance the Cat,” is, as the title suggests, about a cat called Chance. When did this cat first come into your mind as a possible fictional... Read more »
Set in Malaysia between 1935 and 1945, Vanessa Chan’s impressive and assured debut offers a little-told perspective on a turbulent period of history. Inspired by her own grandparents’ experiences under British colonial... Read more »
In “Crown Heights North,” your story in this week’s issue, a dead man downloads a running app—that’s the setup, both simple and deeply complicated. The man was in his mid-fifties when he... Read more »
“When you travel as a girl, you don’t learn anything about the world. All you learn is that there’s a way of looking at the world that doesn’t belong to you,” says twentysomething... Read more »