Sam Sacks

United States

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

Articles

Fiction: ‘The Remembered Soldier’ by Anjet Daanje

6 days 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 week 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

3 weeks 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

1 month 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’

1 month ago | 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’

1 month ago | 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.
Fiction: ‘33 Place Brugmann’ by Alice Austen

2 months ago | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

The title of Alice Austen’s “33 Place Brugmann” points us to the address of an apartment building in a prosperous Brussels neighborhood, a district full of Parisian-style mansions, quiet parks and elegant boutiques. The residents include the art dealer Leo Raphaël, his wife, Sophia, and their children; the architect Francois Sauvin and his daughter Charlotte, a painter; a widowed army colonel; an attorney; a notary and other well-to-do Belgians.
Fiction: Michelle de Kretser’s ‘Theory & Practice’

2 months ago | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

“Artists used to think about art through art. Now they think about it through Theory,” laments a character in Michelle de Kretser’s “Theory & Practice.” But the complaint falls on deaf ears, as the novel’s narrator is bewitched by the apparently irresistible spell of poststructuralism. “Theory rejected binaries, exposed aporias, and posited,” she says.
‘The Suicides’ Review: Antonio di Benedetto’s Lost Souls

Feb 7, 2025 | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

Though Argentina’s cultural hub was in Buenos Aires, the writer Antonio di Benedetto (1922-1986) stayed for most of his life in his birth city of Mendoza, in the foothills of the Andes mountains and some 650 miles from the capital. Di Benedetto was far from a recluse: He worked as a journalist and deputy director of a Mendoza newspaper; he wrote novels, short stories and screenplays; and he had a vocal admirer in the country’s literary panjandrum Jorge Luis Borges.
Fiction: ‘Gliff’ by Ali Smith

Jan 30, 2025 | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

“Language is like poppies,” says a character in Ali Smith’s “Autumn,” from 2016. “It just takes something to churn the earth round them up, and when it does up come the sleeping words, bright red, fresh, blowing about.” This is the impression cultivated in the splendid botanical gardens of Ms. Smith’s fiction, where words bloom and flourish in their many definitions, both known and newly invented.