Sam Sacks

United States

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

Articles

Fiction: Chaim Grade’s ‘Sons and Daughters’

3 weeks 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

1 month 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

2 months ago | 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

2 months ago | 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.
‘Everything Must Go’ Review: It’s the End of the World, Again

Jan 24, 2025 | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

“Catastrophe is our bedtime story,” wrote Don DeLillo, a poetic embellishment that nowadays carries an element of factuality. Apocalypse scenarios are so commonplace in movies, television and books—to say nothing of the nightly news—that many of us have literally lulled ourselves to sleep with them. But as Dorian Lynskey demonstrates in “Everything Must Go,” a heady critical history of the depictions of Armageddon, our current-day mania for disaster has plenty of precedent.
Fiction: ‘We Do Not Part’ by Han Kang

Jan 17, 2025 | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

In Han Kang’s novel “We Do Not Part,” newly translated from the Korean by E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, the narrator visits a friend who is in the hospital after severing the tips of her fingers in a woodworking accident. The fingertips have been sewn back on, but to prevent necrosis doctors must constantly prick them with needles, causing them to bleed.
Fiction: ‘Mothers and Sons’ by Adam Haslett

Jan 8, 2025 | wsj.com | Sam Sacks

Peter Fischer, in Adam Haslett’s novel “Mothers and Sons,” is an immigration attorney for a New York City nonprofit that provides defense during deportation proceedings. To help his clients gain asylum, Peter needs them to dredge up, in scrupulous detail, the most awful moments of their lives—the political murder of a family member, for instance, or years of forced service as a child soldier. “They don’t want to have to remember,” he says, “but that’s what I do—mostly.
Such a Schemozzle

Jan 2, 2025 | harpers.org | Sam Sacks

Discussed in this essay:The Pornographer, by John McGahern. New York Review Books. 272 pages. $17.95. If you were asked to name the finest Irish writer of the second half of the twentieth century, a strong case could be made for John McGahern. By 2006, when he published his final book, a work of autobiography that was titled All Will Be Well in the United States but in Ireland simply Memoir, his mastery was so established that his peers were rolling their eyes at it.