Sam Sacks

United States

Editor, Open Letters Review and Writer at The Wall Street Journal

Articles

Fiction: Susan Choi’s ‘Flashlight’

3 weeks ago | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

Plus Lucas Schaefer’s ‘The Slip.’Susan Choi’s “Flashlight” begins with a disappearance. It is 1978 and Serk Kang is taking a nighttime walk with his 10-year-old daughter, Louisa, on the breakwater near his seaside vacation house on Japan’s western coast. Soon after, bystanders find Louisa soaking wet and unconscious on the shore. When she wakes she has no clear memory of what happened. There is no trace of her father.
Fiction: Donald Niedekker’s ‘Strange and Perfect Account From the Permafrost’

4 weeks ago | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

Plus Russell Persson’s ‘The Way of Florida’ and Inger Christensen’s ‘The Painted Room.’Between 1594 and 1597, the Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz piloted three voyages through the frozen seas of the Arctic Circle in failed attempts to discover a northerly trade route to the Orient.
Fiction: ‘Parallel Lines’ by Edward St. Aubyn

1 month ago | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

The author of the Patrick Melrose novels follows his career-long concern with the workings of the brain into an era of biotech advances. Edward St. Aubyn’s five-book cycle, the Patrick Melrose novels, published between 1992 and 2011 and now widely recognized as a classic of British literature, covers a lot of territory in the chronicle of its magnetically messed-up hero.
Fiction: ‘Only Smoke’ by Juan José Millás

1 month ago | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

Plus Rickey Fayne’s ‘The Devil Three Times’ and Vivek Shanbhag’s ‘Sakina’s Kiss.’“In stories,” thinks the main character of Juan José Millás’s “Only Smoke,” “the extraordinary and the ordinary merge like the materials of an alloy in which it then becomes impossible to separate the original constituent parts.” The Spanish novelist is one of my favorite practitioners of this narrative alchemy.
Fiction: ‘The Remembered Soldier’ by Anjet Daanje

1 month ago | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

The real-life case of a Dutch soldier’s amnesia—and the dispute over his identity—is the basis for a tale of grief set in the aftermath of World War I. They were called les morts vivants, or the living dead. These were survivors of the battlefields of World War I who were so severely shell-shocked that they no longer knew who they were. Some were catatonic, some schizophrenic.
Fiction: ‘Twelve Post-War Tales’ by Graham Swift

1 month ago | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

Plus ‘The Deserters’ by Mathias Énard and ‘Glass Century’ by Ross Barkan. Graham Swift offers the title of his third collection of short stories, “Twelve Post-War Tales,” in an egalitarian spirit. The characters include ex-soldiers and war orphans but also teachers, miners, maids and other working-class Britons who know of battlefields only from textbooks and newsreels. Even these civilians, suggests Mr. Swift, have been shaped by war’s carnage. Everyone lives in a postwar world.
Fiction: ‘Major Arcana’ by John Pistelli

2 months ago | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

Plus Vijay Khurana’s ‘The Passenger Seat’ and Osamu Dazai’s ‘No One Knows.’The serial novel has not had a significant role in American publishing for nearly a century, but lately there have been stirrings of a revival. Creative artists, along with journalists and pundits, have begun to migrate to subscription-based media platforms, most notably Substack.
Fiction: ‘Flesh’ by David Szalay

2 months ago | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

The feeling of unease begins with the title in David Szalay’s “Flesh.” Flesh is something different from skin, more elemental and purely physical (its Spanish translation, carne, is also the word for meat). The word suggests cravings and appetites, and it carries an inescapable association with sin.
Fiction: Chaim Grade’s ‘Sons and Daughters’

Mar 28, 2025 | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

Sholem Shachne Katzenellenbogen, esteemed rabbi of the fictional Polish town of Morehdalye, is known as a scholar of genius and a religious leader of exemplary devotion. His pedigree is unsurpassed: He descends from a long line of rabbis and his stalwart wife, Henna’le, is the eldest daughter of Rabbi Eli-Leizer Epstein, a man famed and feared for his zealotry. Beside all this, Sholem Shachne is unusually compassionate.
Fiction: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s ‘Theft’

Mar 20, 2025 | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

Plus Colum McCann’s ‘Twist’ and Nell Zink’s ‘Sister Europe.’In Abdulrazak Gurnah’s “Theft,” a Tanzanian servant named Badar is listening to an anecdote being told by an older friend, the house’s gardener. Impatient with the gardener’s digressions, Badar tries to jump ahead to the point of the story, only to be smilingly admonished. “Don’t be in such a hurry,” the gardener says. “Many things happened.