William Deresiewicz

William Deresiewicz is a regular contributor to The Nation's Books & the Arts section. He was nominated for a 2008 National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism.

Meetings, Purchases, Pleasures

August 27, 2008

Salman Rushdie probes the limits of the imagination to produce his most coherent and readable novel.
Dead Letters

May 22, 2008

Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig saw himself as a Freud of fiction--a fellow spelunker in the caverns of the heart.
Professing Literature in 2008

March 11, 2008

Why is the intellectual agenda of English departments being set by teenagers?
Foes

February 7, 2008

J.M. Coetzee, now out with a new novel and a collection of essays, reminds us what a master he is at turning life into narrative.

2007

Fukú Americanus

November 8, 2007

Junot Díaz's masterful new novel maps the ambiguities in the modern immigrant experience in America.
The Imaginary Jew

May 10, 2007

Two new novels, by Michael Chabon and Nathan Englander, recharge the modern Jewish experience with a sense of the exotic.
Cafe Society

April 26, 2007

Clive James's erudite new collection of essays celebrates the best of twentieth-century art, thought and politics.
The Book of Questions

February 6, 2007

In a book-length essay on the novel, Milan Kundera foresees the curtain of literary history drawing to a close.

2006

Awesome Powers

November 21, 2006
Representative Fictions

November 16, 2006

An ambitious two-volume history of the novel explores its evolution across continents and centuries.
Science Fiction

September 20, 2006

Richard Powers's The Echo Maker speaks volumes about neuroscience, nature and environmental degradation. But it says little about what it means to be alive.
Dead Man

May 11, 2006

Philip Roth's Everyman is a contemporary morality play that explores the author's obsessions with health and virility, ecstasy and betrayal, and the certainty and solitude of death.

2005

Zadie Smith's Indecision

September 15, 2005

It can't be easy to rein in a writer as successful as Zadie Smith. Her new novel, On Beauty, proves it's almost impossible.
It's a Man's, Man's World

August 25, 2005

Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men seems designed as a calculated assault on the reader.