Sam Sacks
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I write the Fiction Chronicle for the Wall Street Journal and am an editor at Open Letters Review (formerly Open Letters Monthly). sam_sacks at hotmail dot com.
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Articles by Sam Sacks
Fiction: Chad Harbach’s ‘The Brightness’
Plus ‘Dodge City’ by Patrick deWitt. In Chad Harbach’s “The Brightness” (Little, Brown, 672 pages, $32), Pella Affenlicht makes a comparison she hopes will resonate with the men with whom she’s conversing. Being a woman, she explains, is like being an athlete: Competition is fierce, and one’s prime is cruelly brief. “You keep one eye on the clock—your time is running out before it begins.
Fiction: ‘The Spirits’ by Bonnie Jo Campbell
Plus ‘Last Day of a Prior Life’ by Andrés Barba and ‘May We Feed the King’ by Rebecca Perry. Everyone knows that politics and religion are off-limits as discussion topics at holiday gatherings, but for the Whitby children in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s “The Spirits” (Norton, 256 pages, $27.99) there is another, highly specific prohibition: No one is allowed to talk about the Christmas Eve when their drunken, abusive father was killed by a lightning strike in their backyard.
Fiction: 'Soldiers & Sailors' by Terrence Holt
Hypnopompic hallucinations are what specialists call the unreal things people see or hear during the transition from sleep to waking. In Terrence Holt's debut novel, “Soldiers & Sailors” (Liveright, 432 pages, $31.99) , the phenomenon offers the only diagnosis Dr. Hal Adams can think to give a military veteran who claims to hear the Marines' Hymn every night while he sleeps. “I had a whole career of reveille,” the man complains.
Fiction: 'Exit Party' by Emily St. John Mandel
Cataclysm is everywhere in contemporary fiction and the writers who handle it best tend to be those with the lightest touch. The master of disaster may be Kazuo Ishiguro, whose evocations of broken civilizations—post-World War II Nagasaki in “A Pale View of Hills” (1982) and futurist dystopias in “Never Let Me Go” (2005) and “Klara and the Sun” (2021)—are so gentle they read almost like lullabies.
Fiction: Emma Cline's ‘Switzy'
The title of Emma Cline's “Switzy” (Random House, 352 pages, $32) is a goofy nickname for Switzerland, the last stop for the novel's main character, David Hastings. David is a divorced, 70-something business executive suffering from the early or perhaps middle stages of Alzheimer's. He was fired by his firm for accounting errors and has since been given a sinecure by a sympathetic corporate friend.
Fiction: 'The Disappearers' by Marlon James
Among the strongest sensations inspired by Marlon James's “The Disappearers” (Riverhead, 640 pages, $32) is a nostalgia for 1980s pop culture. Edmond “Eddy” Porteous, one of the novel's narrators, is an 18-year-old gay man in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1988, and like many artsy young people he expresses his personality through the music he listens to. Eddy has a serious thing for Bruce Springsteen—his music and his skintight blue jeans.
Fiction: ‘The Disappearers’ by Marlon James
11 hours ago When we think of the Civil Rights Movement and famous writers at the time, one of the most well-known names that comes to mind is James Baldwin’s. He was a Civil Rights activist on top of being an American writer who received acclaim for his many essays, novels, poems, plays and more. As Britannica …
Fiction: ‘The Song of Stork and Dromedary' by Anjet Daanje
The Nobel Prize in literature has always been highly Eurocentric, so it is odd that the Netherlands has never fielded a recipient. This is assuredly a consequence of bad luck rather than a measurement of merit. Harry Mulisch, the author of “The Assault” (1982) and “The Discovery of Heaven” (1992), deserved the award. And it seems to me that the country has a formidable present-day contender, the novelist Anjet Daanje.
Fiction: Chang-rae Lee's 'A Tender Age'
The American institution of the sleepaway camp has inspired a genre of cinema, so it's curious that it calls to mind so few representations in fiction. Philip Roth depicted it for his bitter, late-career novel “Nemesis” (2010). A 1970s arts camp is where characters forge lifelong friendships in Meg Wolitzer's “The Interestings” (2013).
Fiction: ‘The Oldest Bitch Alive’ by Morgan Day
Plus ‘Wolf, Moon, Dog’ by Thomas Wharton and ‘Etna’ by Paul Yoon. July 29, 2026 10:47 am ET After he is kidnapped from his cushy California home and sent to toil as a sled dog in the Canadian Klondike, Buck, the St. Bernard-shepherd mix in Jack London’s “The Call of the Wild” (1903), is gripped by the ancient impulses of his species.
Fiction: 'Air' by Christian Kracht
Sam Sacks The mind-body question that has perplexed philosophers for millennia has acquired added resonance in the digital era. How should we think about the information that fills the internet and organizes the way we live? Is it matter, a physical thing, or is it more like energy, something impalpable? Two novels involving data centers seem to occupy opposite sides of the techno-mystic and techno-materialist divide.
Fiction: ‘Air’ by Christian Kracht
Plus Nathaniel Rich’s ‘Cloudthief’ and Jem Calder’s ‘I Want You to Be Happy.’ The mind-body question that has perplexed philosophers for millennia has acquired added resonance in the digital era. How should we think about the information that fills the internet and organizes the way we live? Is it matter, a physical thing, or is it more like energy, something impalpable? Two novels involving data centers seem to occupy opposite sides of the techno-mystic and techno-materialist divide.
Fiction: David Baerwald’s ‘The Fire Agent’
A German Jew in Tokyo during the early 20th century becomes a spy reporting on the rise of extremism in Japan. Early in David Baerwald’s “The Fire Agent” (Spiegel & Grau, 624 pages, $32), a German-Jewish businessman named Ernst, who has moved to Japan to further his company’s interests, meets a Zen monk tending a garden. It is 1910 and Ernst fears that both Europe and Asia are moving inexorably toward war. “Imagine the blossom,” the monk tells him. “It blooms, then it falls from the tree. . . .
A Fictional History of the U.S.
June 19, 2026 11:14 am ET In Irvington, N.Y., outside the town hall, a heavily bearded figure lies beneath a beech tree. It’s a statue of Rip Van Winkle, the character created by the town’s namesake, Washington Irving, who imagined a man who fell asleep a few years before the American Revolution and woke up 20 years later, astonished and confused by all that had changed. For the country’s semiquincentennial, my editors asked a question: What if old Rip had slept not for 20 years but 250?
Fiction: ‘The Last Human Bear’ by Greg Sarris
Plus Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Ghost-Eye’ and Keith Ridgway’s ‘Dooneen.’ Mary Hatcher, the narrator of Greg Sarris’s “The Last Human Bear” (Heyday, 384 pages, $30), is, in her words, “illegitimate every way but Sunday.” Her mother was a Pomo Indian who killed herself after being taken advantage of by the heir of a prominent ranching family in California’s Sonoma County.
Fiction: ‘Whistler’ by Ann Patchett
A woman reunites with a father she hasn’t seen in decades and faces the guilt she felt after her mother left him. Updated May 29, 2026 4:00 pm ET The saying goes that, in literature, happiness writes white on the page. To which Martin Amis added, “and goodness writes purple.” In either case, positivity poses a dramatic conundrum, being too quiet or too sentimental. Stories thrive on conflict, which confers an unjust advantage upon the dysfunctional, the belligerent and the wicked.
Fiction: ‘Palaces of the Crow’ by Ray Nayler
Plus Harriet Clark’s ‘The Hill’ and Ali Smith’s ‘Glyph.’ Crows can design tools, play games and solve puzzles. They nest in colonies where they parent their young for up to five years, care for their elderly and mourn their dead. With humans they have been known to form friendships, share gifts and recognize dangers, an ability that precipitates the dark, captivating story in Ray Nayler’s “Palaces of the Crow” (MCD, 384 pages, $29).
Microsoft Cares About Your Privacy ‘Kafkaesque' review: The metamorphosis of a voice
Sam Sacks In 1914, agitated by his friends' insistence that he become involved in the Zionist movement, Franz Kafka wrote in his diaries, “what have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself.” This is the Kafka that has been passed to posterity—the outsider, the pariah, the man condemned to a condition of eternal estrangement. The teeming secondary material produced about his work always emphasizes the dislocations of his biography.
‘Kafkaesque’ Review: The Metamorphosis of a Voice
2 hours ago PRAGUE, May 15 (Reuters) - An 800-year-old skull snatched this week from a Czech church has been found encased in concrete, police said, and experts are now working to extract the relic, revered as the skull of Saint Zdislava. Czech police detained a 35-year-old man on Thursday, who admitted to …
‘Kafkaesque’ Review: The Metamorphosis of a Voice
Translating Kafka could be deeply affecting. Primo Levi once described emerging from the task ‘as if from an illness.’ Franz Kafka owes his literary legacy to Max Brod, who defied the writer’s wishes and published Kafka’s work posthumously. Here Kafka, right, is seen with Brod’s bother, Otto. Heritage Images via Getty Images In 1914, agitated by his friends’ insistence that he become involved in the Zionist movement, Franz Kafka wrote in his diaries, “what have I in common with Jews?
Fiction: ‘A Private Man’ by Stephanie Sy-Quia
What amazes David Fletcher about Rome, where in 1953 he is ordained as a priest, is the “sensualism” of the place. In Stephanie Sy-Quia’s “A Private Man” (Grove, 288 pages, $27), David and his band of freshly minted English clergymen enjoy an Italian interlude before going to their assigned parishes.
Fiction: ‘John of John’ by Douglas Stuart
As Champagne must come from its designated region in France, Harris tweed can only be made in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides islands. To receive accreditation, writes Douglas Stuart in “John of John” (Grove, 416 pages, $28), the cloth has to be woven “in exactly the same manner as it had been centuries before,” with a handloom powered by treadle pedals. Mr. Stuart’s novel describes the weaving shed of the Macleods, a family on the Isle of Harris.
Fiction: Jay McInerney’s ‘See You on the Other Side’
April 17, 2026 11:46 am ET New York City glamour is a cliché, but it’s one so rarely used these days that Jay McInerney’s gauzy Gotham romance, “See You on the Other Side” (Knopf, 304 pages, $30), has the feel of a novelty. Mr. McInerney has been writing love letters to New York since his 1984 breakthrough, “Bright Lights, Big City,” a coked-up chronicle of literary and sexual aspirations. His characters have aged in subsequent books, but the city has defied the laws of entropy.
Fiction: ‘Lázár' by Nelio Biedermann
Sam Sacks To hazard a generalization, the archetypal American novel in the 20th century was a story of upward mobility, whereas the novel in Europe was one of decline. In “Lázár” (Summit, 272 pages, $28) , the Swiss writer Nelio Biedermann calls back to this continental tradition with a chronicle about the deteriorating fortunes of an aristocratic Hungarian family.
Fiction: Ben Lerner’s ‘Transcription’
Ben Lerner’s novel poetically recounts its narrator’s relationship with an eminent scholar. What is a poet to do when no one reads poetry anymore? Ben Lerner’s answer has been to seek out an audience where one still (if only barely) exists: in the novel. Mr. Lerner’s first books were poetry volumes; a recent collection, “The Lights,” was published in 2023.
Fiction: ‘The Disappearing Act’ by Maria Stepanova
Plus Victoria Shorr’s ‘Fatherland’ and Sarah Orne Jewett’s ‘A Marsh Island.’ To fashion a work of art from the material of war is to risk exploiting, or even ennobling, the horrors that are depicted; but to say nothing about those horrors can seem like defeatism—or worse, complicity. It is a moral conundrum that can have no resolution. So much of contemporary literature reads like a tortured attempt to negotiate between the irreconcilable positions of righteous expression and guilty silence.
Fiction: ‘Still Talking’ by Lore Segal
In Lore Segal’s fiction, memory is a mine of storytelling wealth—and conversation is the vital thread of life itself. Lore Segal was 10 years old in 1938 when Nazi Germany annexed Austria and began the process of annulling the citizenships and confiscating the properties of Jewish families such as her own. Her father secured her passage from Vienna to London on the Kindertransport, the child-rescue program sponsored by British aid committees in collaboration with the British government.
Fiction: ‘The Complex’ by Karan Mahajan
The power struggles within a contentious Indian family feed the rise of a demagogue. S.P. Chopra, the revered patriarch of the feuding clan in Karan Mahajan’s “The Complex” (Viking, 448 pages, $30), was a framer of India’s constitution and a cabinet minister in the government of Jawaharlal Nehru, who ruled from independence in 1947 until 1964.
Fiction: ‘Now I Surrender’ by Álvaro Enrigue
Plus Francis Spufford’s ‘Nonesuch.’ The Apache medicine man Geronimo made his now-legendary name leading raids and eluding capture during the Apache wars of the 19th century. Geronimo’s people, who refused to submit to colonization, fought these wars on two fronts: against the U.S. in the north and Mexico in the south. Though they were penned in and ruthlessly pursued, their mastery of the Sierra Madre made them nearly untouchable.
Fiction: ‘Mule Boy’ by Andrew Krivak
Plus Urszula Honek’s ‘White Nights’ and Julio Llamazares’s ‘Wolf Moon.’ “On the first day of 1929 I went down into the mine not with a sprag in hand but with a carrot in my growler for Wicked the mule, and in the pocket of my overalls that day, as they are in my pocket still, I kept the rosary my mother had given me on my eighth birthday, my father’s rosary.” These are the recollections of Ondro Prach, the narrator of Andrew Krivak’s “Mule Boy” (Bellevue, 192 pages, $17.99), who grew up among...
Fiction: ‘I Give You My Silence’ by Mario Vargas Llosa
Plus Rahul Bhattacharya’s ‘Railsong’ and Mohammed Hanif’s ‘Rebel English Academy.’ The hero of Mario Vargas Llosa’s “I Give You My Silence” (FSG, 256 pages, $28)—the final novel of the Peruvian Nobel laureate, who died in 2025 at the age of 89—is a seedy, impoverished music scholar named Toño Azpilcueta.
‘On Morrison' and ‘Language as Liberation': Toni Morrison's complex craft
Sam Sacks Authorial influence can be a torturous matter. Much has been said, notably by the critic Harold Bloom, about the agony of the artist who labors under the shadow of the greats. But what about the plight of the literary influencer? Few 20th-century writers bred as many imitators as Ernest Hemingway, but his followers rarely matched the subtleties of his deceptively simple style.
‘On Morrison’ and ‘Language as Liberation’: Toni Morrison’s Complex Craft
Morrison’s true genius was as a stylist. Her challenging books demand to be plumbed, debated, compared—and reread. Authorial influence can be a torturous matter. Much has been said, notably by the critic Harold Bloom, about the agony of the artist who labors under the shadow of the greats. But what about the plight of the literary influencer? Few 20th-century writers bred as many imitators as Ernest Hemingway, but his followers rarely matched the subtleties of his deceptively simple style.
Fiction: ‘This Is Not About Us’ by Allegra Goodman
Every great feud must be sealed by something trivial, and for Helen and Sylvia, the elderly Rubinstein sisters in Allegra Goodman’s “This Is Not About Us” (Dial, 336 pages, $29), the last straw is the preparation of an apple cake. Helen, the oldest sibling, is a domineering homemaker who has appointed herself keeper of the family recipes. Her baking is tireless and punitive, as though she were preparing medicine. Sylvia has rebelled with her own version of their mother’s apple cake.
Fiction: ‘Crucible’ by John Sayles
Plus Cristina Rivera Garza’s ‘Autobiography of Cotton.’ Midway into his novel “Crucible,” John Sayles imagines the meeting between Henry Ford and the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, who has been commissioned by the Detroit Institute of Arts—and funded by Ford’s son, Edsel—to create a mural depicting the region’s industrial heritage. You can hardly imagine two men less likely to see eye to eye. Rivera is a communist (though when this scene takes place in 1932, he has been expelled from the party).
Fiction: ‘Crux’ by Gabriel Tallent
Plus ‘Vigil’ by George Saunders. One of the coolest maneuvers Gabriel Tallent describes in his boisterous rock-climbing novel, “Crux” (Riverhead, 416 pages, $30), is called hand jamming. The idea is that climbers can ascend along a crack in a boulder by slipping a relaxed hand deep into the crevice and then expanding it, thereby locking it in place so that it can support their body weight. As Mr. Tallent explains, jamming is not something that can be learned in a gym.
Fiction: ‘Departure(s)’ by Julian Barnes
In his 2008 memoir, “Nothing to Be Frightened Of,” Julian Barnes writes that he became aware of death early, at the age of 13 or 14, and that since then not a day has passed when it hasn’t troubled his thoughts. “Mortality often gatecrashes my consciousness when the outside world presents an obvious parallel,” he says, “as evening falls, as the days shorten, or towards the end of a long day’s hiking.” Unsurprisingly, Mr. Barnes’s thanatophobia has been a fixation of his work.
Fiction: 'Lost Lambs' by Madeline Cash
One thing to be said for the splintered families of three new novels is that being dysfunctional is better than being nonfunctionalat least an effort is being made. In Madeline Cashs delightfully cracked debut novel, Lost Lambs (FSG, 336 pages, $28), problems begin when a restless housewife and mother, Catherine Flynn, unilaterally announces an arrangement with her stunned husband, Bud, that opens their marriage and lets her pursue a flirtation with her smooth-talking neighbor.
Fiction: The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits
In Ben Markovitss The Rest of Our Lives (S&S/Summit, 240 pages, $28), the narrator, Tom Layward, confides an unflattering phrase that runs through his thoughts: the heavy tread of middle age on the family stairs. Tom has reached an age when he can no longer get around the house without an accompaniment of creaks and groans and thuds.
Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary: People of the (big, red) book
When I turned 13, I entered a part of the life cycle cherished by all Jewish kids and dreaded by their parents. This was the year of bar and bat mitzvahsmy own, but also those of friends, relatives, Hebrew-school classmates and, it sometimes seemed, any passing acquaintance. Nearly every Saturday morning my mother ferried me to and from synagogue; in the evening she chauffeured me to whichever hotel ballroom was hosting the reception.
Fiction: ‘Disinheritance’ by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Included at the start of the story collection “Disinheritance” (Counterpoint, 352 pages, $30) is a speech that its author, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, delivered in 1979, which has one of the best metaphors for the artistic process that I have come across. I have lived, Jhabvala said, like “a cuckoo forever insinuating myself into others’ nests.” The cuckoo is a parasitic bird that deposits its eggs in the nests of other birds, who then raise its hatchlings with their own.
Fiction: ‘The Name on the Wall’ by Hervé Le Tellier
“I wanted a house where I could invent some roots for myself,” Hervé Le Tellier writes in “The Name on the Wall” (Other Press, 176 pages, $16.99), and he thought he found what he was looking for in a former inn near the town of Dieulefit in southeastern France. When he moved there, however, he found something unusual: Carved into a wall was the name André Chaix.
‘True Nature’ Review: The Restless Peter Matthiessen
In a letter to Peter Matthiessen in 1970, one of many damningly perceptive missives that he received from the women in his life, his second wife, Deborah Love, wrote, “you seem a man in 1000 pieces, running after each one.” Matthiessen’s many masks are on display in “True Nature,” a deeply researched and artfully executed biography by Lance Richardson. This extraordinary man of parts was a novelist, nature writer, editor, environmentalist, political activist, outdoorsman and Zen master.
Fiction: Andrew Miller’s ‘The Land in Winter’
Plus ‘The Ten Year Affair’ by Erin Somers and ‘The Land of Sweet Forever’ by Harper Lee. Sure, we all disapprove of cheaters, but where would the novel be without them? Adultery boasts an unrivaled literary pedigree. It is central to such pillars of the canon as “Madame Bovary” (1856) and “Anna Karenina” (1878) and it helped to usher in the 20th century in works including “The Golden Bowl” (1904) and “Ulysses” (1922).
Growing Old on the Farm
The Wall Street Journal | October 25, 2025 Wendell Berry's Port William family saga unfolds the hardship and beauty of life in a rural corner of Kentucky. IN WENDELL BERRY'S "Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story," the elderly Andy Catlett recalls a family legend that has been passed down through the generations. It is about Andy's grandfather Marce, a Kentucky farmer who in 1906 traveled from his rur This story is from the October 25, 2025 edition of The Wall Street Journal.
Fiction: ‘Marce Catlett’ by Wendell Berry
In Wendell Berry’s “Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story,” the elderly Andy Catlett recalls a family legend that has been passed down through the generations. It is about Andy’s grandfather Marce, a Kentucky farmer who in 1906 traveled from his rural village of Port William to Louisville to sell that year’s tobacco crop. The only buyer at the auction was a corporation that paid so little that Marce barely recouped the cost of his train ticket.
The Legacy of a Con Man
The Wall Street Journal | October 18, 2025 AT THE START of Lee Clay Johnson’s “Bloodline” (Panamerica, 376 pages, $25), Winston Alcorn drives with his wife and two sons to a sawmill in central Tennessee looking for work. The mill owner, Miss Becka, is a compassionate soul, so she hires Winston without references. It’s the opportunity he needs. His first day on the job, Winston sticks his arm into the saw and cuts his hand clean off.
Fiction: Lee Clay Johnson’s ‘Bloodline’
Plus Fredrik deBoer’s ‘The Mind Reels’ and Claire-Louise Bennett’s ‘Big Kiss, Bye-Bye.’ At the start of Lee Clay Johnson’s “Bloodline” (Panamerica, 376 pages, $25), Winston Alcorn drives with his wife and two sons to a sawmill in central Tennessee looking for work. The mill owner, Miss Becka, is a compassionate soul, so she hires Winston without references. It’s the opportunity he needs. His first day on the job, Winston sticks his arm into the saw and cuts his hand clean off.
‘The Wayfinder’ Review: Uncharted Waters
Adam Johnson’s epic is a story of power, survival, loss and courage, set in the Polynesia of centuries past. Storytelling thrives—is needed—wherever knowledge is scant. The fiction writer, then, must seek out remaining pockets of mystery. The psychological novel gained prominence as the 19th-century world became mapped and colonized, the mind offering a new realm for discovery. The search for terra incognita can explain the explosion, in the 20th century, of science fiction and magical realism.
Fiction: Emmelie Prophète’s ‘Cécé’
Plus Claire Adam’s ‘Love Forms’ and Kiran Desai’s ‘The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.’ The narrator of Emmelie Prophète’s “Cécé” (Archipelago, 224 pages, $18) is Célia Jérôme, a destitute young woman in Haiti’s gang-ridden Cité of Divine Power, a “lost corner of a lost country, a boil on the lip of a sick nation.” Célia lives with her alcoholic uncle and scrapes together money by “entertaining” male visitors, though she hates the work and doesn’t have many clients.
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