You’ve likely heard of the literary genres autobiography and the semi-autobiographical novel, in which an author either recites their life story or inserts parts of themselves and their life into a work of fiction. In film, an increasingly popular genre is the biopic, a big-screen account of a public figure’s life. Also popular are the “based on a true story” films, which range from any number of genres. But while such a genre does exist in fiction, called biofiction, the moral and artistic ethics surrounding its execution are often called into question.

What is biofiction, exactly? Well, it’s shortened from biographical fiction, which, in short, means works of fiction that draw from biographical fact. This concept can work wonderfully in film, in which Hollywood can get away with taking any number of creative liberties in relaying the real-life story of a celebrity—or anyone with a story that will sell, really. But in order to make that very story sell, the writers and producers of a movie will often need to bend the truth to fit a certain artistic vision. Of course, skewing history can be messy, no matter what medium you’re dealing with. But when it comes to literary fiction, readers and critics can often hold authors to a higher standard than filmmakers, in my opinion.

It’s just as easy to write a novel about a celebrity as it is to make a film about them, in the sense that there are always going to be public figures who will resonate in the public eye and culture. Take Marilyn Monroe, for example, whose life has been so intricately picked apart by biographers to the present day that it almost feels disrespectful to keep on digging up a woman who deserves nothing more than peace.

Writing a work of non-fiction about Monroe is one thing. But when Joyce Carol Oates wrote and published Blonde in 2000, her novel of biographical fiction in which she took it upon herself to imagine Monroe’s life and innermost thoughts, it felt like crossing a line. Especially when the novel was adapted into a feature film by Netflix over two decades later. It was the first film on the streaming service to receive an NC-17 rating. Why? Because of a particular scene in the film drawn from the novel, in which Monroe is brutally raped. While no one can say definitely that the star was never sexually violated in her lifetime, the fictionalization of such an event reads as violating in a different sense.

“Admiring Marilyn feels less trivial than the adulation of any ordinary pin-up because the love – or the lust – is mixed with pity. And the moral high ground of compassion makes us feel special, more sensitive, nicer,” wrote Cressida Connolly in her review of Blonde for The Guardian in April 2000. “It also bestows a license to snoop, allowing us to inquire into the most private reaches of her life without charges of prurience.” She referred to the novel as a “shabby piece of work” and remarked that its problems stem from the form of the book. “Fictionalizing a life is a dodgy business, because the only thing which separates it from biography is conjecture, and, by extension, untruth. When the facts of the subject’s life are as copiously recorded as Marilyn’s, only the wildest invention can heave such an enterprise into fiction.”

It is a truth now universally acknowledged that historical fiction is having a bit of a moment, especially in the domain of the type of books that are often referred to as literary fiction. I have always been a sucker for narratives set in the past and have thought long and hard about what makes them so appealing, especially in times when the world around you seems to be going up in flames. I have not been very good at reading books fresh off the press, though — I am usually drowning in my TBR pile full of backlist titles.

To shake things up a little, one of my reading goals last year had been to read at least some books published in 2023. I managed to read quite a few – owing in no small part to the amazing historical fiction that has been published this year. From new novels from heavyweights like Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith to some unbelievably inspiring debut novels, there was such a wide variety of stories to choose from. Here is some of the best historical fiction published in 2023 to whisk you off to different times and places and offer fresh perspectives on the present.

In summer 2023, a rash of bomb threats hit suburban Chicago libraries. They weren’t alone in getting these threats, as libraries in several other states also reported such email and phone calls. In Chicagoland, the threats dragged out for several weeks, with multiple libraries getting them more than once. A potential suspect was arrested, though no further details about the individual’s involvement has been shared since mid-October.

Now Minnesota public libraries have become subject to a similar wave of bomb threats. Beginning on Friday afternoon, several public libraries received bomb threats via phone call. Among them were Fergus Falls Public Library, which closed for the remainder of the day out of an abundance of caution, as well as East Central Regional Library system, which received the call late afternoon and closed several branches of the library on Saturday.

Northfield Public Library also got a threat on Friday and closed their library early.

Jessica Faust, marketing and communication manager for the East Central Regional Library system told the Pine County News that they “received two separate phone calls, it appears the calls came from the same person who seemed to be reading from a script.”

Bomb threats continued into this week. On Tuesday, Heritage Library in Lakeville, part of the Dakota County Library System, received a threat. The library closed early in response.

In the opinion of Simone Weil, King Lear was the only one of Shakespeare’s tragedies completely permeated with a pure spirit of love, and therefore on a level with the “immobile” theater of the Greeks. Perhaps Richard II never caught her attention at an auspicious moment. It is, anyway, very difficult to grasp and wrest into the light this mysterious tragedy, the most silent of all of Shakespeare’s works—this path that is constantly covering its own tracks, this voice that doesn’t want to raise any particular problem or to support any particular thesis. A story recounted with eyes downcast, slowly and, one might say, in the dark: en una noche oscura.

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings—
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed.

For five long symphonic acts, full of returns and rigorous reprises, confined in the very tight mesh of unbroken blank verse, not a single laugh, in this drama of young people, not one gallantry or a pleasantry, even a lugubrious one, from a clown. Not one of those great breaths of spring or autumn. Not one of those gratuitous songs as natural to Shakespeare as the circulation of the blood. In Richard II, everything falls inexorably down. Everything obeys the law of gravity. And yet it is in Richard II, more than in any other work since Homer, that the royal gestures “continually cross like blinding flashes” and grace blooms, a pure, pale flower, on the dark foliage of necessity. Never, I think, have “gravity and grace” been more exactly encapsulated in a play.

If Hamlet is the tragedy of irresolution, Richard II is the tragedy of relativity, or rather of reversibility. A group of young princes, united by ties of blood, and profoundly divided by this same blood (which has many times been spilled by their ancestors), whose consciences are extremely refined and whose spirits are ardent and melancholic, unremittingly clash in an attempt at loyalty and unity that is continually frustrated. Behind them two old men, John of Gaunt and the Duke of York, grow feeble and obscurely fall into the same strain, already tinged with defeat or with a presage of death.

Every December day that I’m in Maine I swim in the ocean and my husband tells me I’m insane. The temperature keeps dropping. I get two respiratory infections, a twenty-four-hour stomach thing. Why? he says to me. Mom, the children say. They have only recently transitioned me to Mom from Mommy, and every time they say it my breath catches. Their dad’s Cuban and I’ve tried to convince them to transition me to Mami. It’s Spanish! I say. You’re white, Mom, they say. You know, Mom, our younger kid says, beating yourself up isn’t a hobby. I’m preparing, I tell them. For what? they say. For January.

The first January we live in Maine, the twenty-second month of the pandemic: we’re all so tired and almost everyone I know in New York is sick. My job has gone remote and I get up each morning to work when it’s still dark. I turn on the small space heater in my office and wrap a big blanket around myself, sit with my computer on my lap. Evening comes, and I text my friend five minutes before I teach at seven. I’ve been at my desk for fourteen hours but can’t think of a single thing I’ve done. What if I hate teaching now? I say. Babe, my friend texts back, it’s January. You hate everything.

The Januarys in high school are all track—all the early Januarys are in Florida and the monotony of those sunny, plastic, clear and cloudless days comes to feel like it’s assaulting me. I run four events at least. The two-mile is the longest, and the last race of the day. Late nights on the bus, the too-big jacket and sweatpants, crumbled rubber on bare thighs while I sit and stretch with my Discman, bile in my throat at the start; everybody cheers when I win, no one after talks to me.

The first January in New York, alone, on Tenth Street between C and D, I’m twenty-one. I call in sick to work. I tell them I got food poisoning because I’ve worked nonstop for months and I can’t fathom smiling another minute, another day, at some klatch of too-thin women who order just one order of our extra-special-everybody-loves-it chocolate-bag dessert with extra spoons, whipped cream on the side; at some guy, with his hand on the low curve of my back, who keeps sending back his steak. I count the cash stuffed in the dark wood box I keep by my bed and then I call again and tell them I threw up so much I ruptured my esophagus and now I have to go to the hospital. I think about how easy lying is. I read books all day, watch TV all night, hardly eat because I can’t afford to eat. The restaurant is uptown and I live downtown and I walk around the whole time assuming that I won’t get caught and I don’t. Oh God, they all say when I come back to work, their eyes scanning my face, you must have been so sick.

Right after ChatGPT was made publicly available, people kept sending Nick Cave algorithmically generated song lyrics in the style of Nick Cave. At first, he tried to ignore them, but they kept arriving. Dozens of them. After reading one that featured a chorus with the refrain “I am the sinner, I am the saint / I am the darkness, I am the light,” Cave felt compelled to respond with an open letter published on his personal website. “This song sucks,” the former punk musician begins. Real songwriting arises from the “internal human struggle of creation,” a process that “requires my humanness.” “Algorithms don’t feel” and cannot participate in this “authentic creative struggle.” Therefore, ChatGPT’s poetry will forever suck, because no matter how closely the lyrics replicate Cave’s own, they will always be deficient.

In Cave’s weltanschauung, as laid out in the letter, the machine is a priori precluded from participating in the authentic creative act, because it is not, well, human. If this argument sounds hollow and slightly narcissistic, that’s because it is. It follows a circular logic: humans (and Nick Cave) are special because they alone make art, and art is special because it is alone made by humans (and Nick Cave). His argument is also totally familiar and banal—a platitude so endlessly repeated in contemporary discourse that it feels in some way hard-baked into the culture. According to historians of ideas (see Arthur Lovejoy, Isaiah Berlin, Alfred North Whitehead), this thesis took form sometime in the second half of the eighteenth century. A brief and noncomprehensive summary: to preserve human dignity in the face of industrialization, philosophers and poets, who were later called the Romantics, began to redraw ontological boundaries, placing humans, nature, and art on one side, and machines, industry, and rationalism on the other. Poets became paragons of the human, and their poems examples of that which could never be replicated by the machine. William Blake, for instance, one of Cave’s heroes, proposed that if it were not for the “Poetic or Prophetic character,” the universe would become but a “mill with complicated wheels.”

These may have been radical ideas in the late eighteenth century, edgy ripostes to an Enlightenment discourse that had grown stale with its own self-assurance. But two centuries later, the versions of this argument that we have seen play out in response to corporate-manufactured AI hype come across as stale, self-aggrandizing, and distinctly conservative. It also does a disservice to Romanticism’s intellectual legacy, which offers a far more nuanced conception of creativity than Cave’s. In fact, within the Romantic canon there is a metaphor concerning how poetry is made that casts the poet not as an emoting, suffering, conscious being set apart from the inanimate world but as an instrument that takes sensory input and translates it, via some internal mechanism, into poetry. In other words, a kind of machine.

***

Last spring, a friend of a friend visited my office and invited me to Langley to speak to Invisible Ink, the CIA’s creative writing group.

I asked Vivian (not her real name) what she wanted me to talk about.

She said that the topic of the talk was entirely up to me.

I asked what level the writers in the group were.

When we moved into our little house, the large beds of English ivy in the front yard didn’t bother me much. It’s not what I would have chosen—who would choose an invasive species?—but my spouse and I agreed we would come up with a Yard Plan and make strategic choices, slowly and deliberately, including eradicating the ivy. Getting rid of ivy is notoriously difficult—my mom warned me it’s “backbreaking work.” I was also, when we moved in, finishing a book project, then in its sixth year and finally arriving at the fact-checking stage. The ivy project existed in the future.

One day, in a stolen moment of daylight, I was sitting around in our front yard with my spouse and small childwhen I noticed a little ivy creeper reaching out, venturing beyond its bed into the grass. The beds were bad enough as it was, but they certainly could not be permitted to grow. So, I grabbed it and pulled. It did not yield. Tough guy, huh? I regripped and pulled harder, and it popped out of the ground, spraying dry dirt in my face. I was elated. I had contained the ivy. I grabbed another vine and pulled.

That was the beginning. From that moment forward, all I wanted to do was rip ivy out of the ground. The ivy beds were just outside my office window, and I knew they were sending out their little traveler vines and growing their territories whenever I looked away. I started ripping ivy while the baby napped. I started ripping ivy while on calls with editors and sources. I invited a neighbor who had (in my defense, unknown-to-me) back problems to come over and rip ivy with me as a social engagement. (She joined me, and hurt her back.)

Ivy’s presence in a yard is binary: all of it has to go, or those green leaves will spring back up at the next rain. I heard this time and again from neighbors who wandered by as I hunched over my work; it seemed everybody had an ivy-pulling story. One couple stopped repeatedly to tell me that ivy is the work of the Devil. A man took pains to tell me I would never win—it would just come back again. Okay, I said. We’ll see, I thought.

Currently on display at the Museum of the Moving Image is a dollhouse-size hologram that looks straight from the future. David Levine’s Dissolution, on view through March 1, is a sculptural, three-dimensional film: a cube-shaped space projected from below through a vibrating glass plate that hums and whirs like an analog projector. A twenty-minute monologue runs on a loop, voiced by a tired and paranoid human named Vox (Laine Rettmer), who has been trapped inside this machine and turned into a work of art. As Vox bemoans her predicament—existence as both human and artwork—disconnected images come and go: an octopus mining for crypto, fragments of classical sculpture, and a tortoise with a jewel-encrusted shell (the last an homage to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature). The artwork contorts our own bodies, too; I found myself twisting around to see the object from every angle, hypnotized by its miniature beauty and disoriented by its dizzying colors and sounds. A suspicion toward beauty might be the subject of Dissolution, a piece influenced by Brechtian principles of estrangement and alienation: the small, buzzing machine pulls us in only for Vox to spit us back out.

—Elinor Hitt, reader

The work of history is slow, even for the merciless flow of commercial recordings, as is the influence of most compilation albums. Nobody is ever fiending for a compilation—not really. But let them soak, and they can reshape the past or propose a new future by clarifying the present. Wanna Buy a Bridge? (1980) and Platinum Breakz (1996) spring to mind: the former, put together by Rough Trade, definitively expanded the genre of post-punk; the latter, the first in a series released by Metalheadz, confirmed that drum and bass could channel twenty years of Black music into a single convulsive moment. Time Is Away have done something similar with Searchlight Moonbeam, a “narrative compilation” whose contents span almost ninety years of song and suggest a robust team of slippery dreamers.

Nearly seven years after Lin Yi-Han first published her novel Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise in Mandarin, the English translation is finally on its way to publication in the United States—by HarperVia in May. The novel, which was released posthumously, greatly influenced the #MeToo movement in Taiwan; it was widely read and discussed for its depictions of sexual violence and mental health, and it has also raised significant awareness about sexual grooming.

This piece is one of the last nonfiction pieces Lin published before her death by suicide in 2017. It appeared originally in Mandarin, on BuzzFeed Taiwan, and reflects on the language we use to describe mental illness—words like psychopath, or telling someone to “go check themselves in” as though they were ill. Her descriptions of her time in a psychiatric hospital, layered with the scenes in the university library where she studied, are movingly drawn, and overlap thematically with much of her novel.

 The piece was translated by Jenna Tang, who also translated Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise into English. Tang first encountered Lin’s work in 2017 and immediately knew she wanted to translate it; she was drawn in by Lin’s lyricism and the echoes of Classical Chinese literature in her work, especially poetry. “I could feel her love for writers like Eileen Chang, Hu-Lan Cheng, and more,” Tang told the Review. Tang said, “The way she builds a sense of place through her writing makes me feel like she has always been alive and present with her languages.” The posthumous translation was especially challenging, she said, because she wasn’t able to consult the author on particular choices; still, what Tang describes as the tenderness of Lin’s style made it easier to feel close to the author, even at a distance. “Translating her work was like embodying that language full of warmth and love, which will never go away,” Tang said.

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Farid Matuk’s “Crease” appears in our new Winter issue, no. 246.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

The images and ideas in the poem started long ago, in college, when I met a brilliant artist named Jeannie Simms. Around that time, they were doing a series of photograms, images made by laying an object on photographic paper and exposing it to light, called Interiors: Little Death. Jeannie had said their process was “to make love” to photographic paper. The results are gorgeous ruins, pieces of photographic paper bearing no image but deeply creased and distressed by Jeannie’s touch. I’ve never stopped thinking about the poetics of that process—the intersection of abstraction and embodied desire it involves, the way it confounds the photograph’s habit of delivering bodies as spectacle. Now, almost twenty years later, I’m mostly interested in Jeannie’s desire to create a space where sex, ritual, and art are one and to make a trace there. “Crease” is part of a longer manuscript, and a lot of that book tries to attend to moments where we can sense that entanglement as ethical, sensuous, and joyful.

The part of the poem about the falling flowers comes from time I spent as a visiting professor at University of California, Berkeley. The school puts you up in a little house donated by the poet Josephine Miles in an area just north of the campus that houses many seminaries and churches. In March of 2020, the neighborhood fell into a routine of evening walks. It was good to be outside and to have a reason to walk slowly, to know most folks around you were caring for their own health and for yours too. But there was also an air of privileged piety about the whole scene—very different than the lives of the “essential workers.” Hence the surliness in the poem about everyone wanting their “stupid church high on a hill.”

On my walks, I kept noticing floppy flowers dropped on the sidewalk. I liked the idea that they were so heavy with their own sex that they had to fall off their stems. The flowers still looked utterly vital sitting on the sidewalk. I am in desperate need of anything heavy enough to crease the infinite regress of what’s given to us as Cartesian space, anything that will make the void fold back so that there’s no void. That’s where my drafts started to test variations on the somewhat familiar phrase “not with but of.”

In 1974, Harry Stein and Thomas Moore, young editors who’d worked together at New Times, a glossy biweekly in New York, had an idea: Let’s start a magazine—in Paris. Moore had recently come into a windfall when one of his articles, about a bank robbery in Brooklyn, became the basis for the film Dog Day Afternoon. He moved to Paris, following his then girlfriend; the relationship ended, but he stayed. Stein had previously lived in Paris, writing features for the International Herald Tribune, and also had a European girlfriend at the time. At first, the idea seemed impossible: Maybe we should sell baseball caps instead of starting a magazine, Stein thought. But Moore had a vision. He stole the name from the café outside his living room window, stole the masthead logo from the subway sign, and their publication was born: The Paris Metro.

Stein and Moore called Joel Stratte-McClure, a fellow journalist then in Paris on assignment, to tell him that they had a “scoop” on a nuclear meltdown and ask him to meet them in the Bar Hemingway at the Ritz. (There was no meltdown.) Several martinis in, Stratte-McClure joined the Metro team. He quickly became one of the core reporters, writing everything from regular features—an On the Money column, which advised readers about how to invest in wine or bet on horses—to cover stories like “Our Man in the Seine: Gets to the Bottom of the Dirty River—And Comes Back Alive!” A few months later, Moore approached Stratte-McClure about a new role. “Do you balance your checkbook?” Moore asked. “Of course. I’m a fanatic about it,” said Stratte-McClure. Moore’s follow-up: “Would you like to be publisher?”

Nothing else remotely like Metro existed at the time. Other English-language competitors like the Herald Tribune provided local news coverage, but the Metro offered a full high-low smorgasbord, from in-depth interviews with city employees to poetry by writers such as Gregory Corso and capsule reviews of Paris’s worst restaurants to coverage of pickup softball leagues. Stratte-McClure told me in a recent interview that the Metro routinely “tackled taboo subjects. Money, salary, who’s voting for whom, personal details about people.” The Metro also had a robust list of what was going on in Paris, such as job opportunities (“URGENT: Seek Modern Dance Teacher”), personal ads (“WIFE JUST DIED—looking for attractive woman dress size 36, between 20 & 31”; “I should like to offer my husband a totally original birthday present: a good meal out with an attractive girl/woman”), requests for information (“Have you had an abortion in Paris? Share your experience with your sisters”), events (such as, on Bastille Day, the Communist Party’s “traditional swinging affair on the Île Saint-Louis”), and shoestring-budget recipes (“In addition to being extremely good for your health, chicken livers are the biggest bargain at Monoprix”). The magazine allowed its writers the freedom to write what they wanted: to explore longer-form stories that leaned quirky, the result of enmeshment in a subculture or riffing on one’s pet topic.