John Banville’s New York Times review of Susan Sontag’s 1992 historical novel The Volcano Lover begins with a scrap of literary-world drama. His fellow critic George Steiner had, at a books festival years prior, scoffed at novelists who viewed criticism as a lower, less creative mode of writing. In the review, Banville notes that Steiner’s statements “aroused anger and vituperation,” nodding to a long-running sentiment that critics are the Sharks and novelists the Jets and never the twain shall meet. Twenty-five years earlier, in a Times review of Sontag’s second novel, Death Kit, published just one year after her seminal collection of critical essays Against Interpretation, literary critic Eliot Fremont-Smith didn’t mince his words: “The critical and creative imaginations are in some sly way antithetical.”
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, to be a writer in the public imagination was to write fiction. It didn’t matter that many critics—Sontag, Edmund White, Lionel Trilling, James Wood—penned novels (often several), or that even more canonical novelists, among them Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Henry James, tried their hand at criticism. In 2026, as writer and Semiotext(e) co-editor Chris Kraus puts it, “I don’t know anyone who writes criticism who doesn’t write fiction.” Indeed, there’s a whole cohort of authors who have followed in Kraus’s signature blend of confessional first-person narrative, critical theory, and fiction, beginning with I Love Dick (1997) and Aliens & Anorexia (2000) and continuing across seven subsequent books, most recently last year’s The Four Spent the Day Together. Kraus notes that, as criticism has become deprofessionalized, the genre boundaries between fiction, autofiction, narrative nonfiction, and critical theory have become more porous—and rhetorical stances softer. That fluidity has led to fewer rockstar public intellectuals like Sontag but also a more protean critical landscape, where a writer might pen a novella in response to an art show, as Mark von Schlegell did for Katharina Jahnke this past May.
Other writers, like Ben Eastham, editor of e-flux Criticism and art critic at The Guardian, have taken to fiction to explore the increasingly weird conditions of art production and intellectual labor in contemporary society. His debut novel, The Floating World, out Sept. 29, follows a newly widowed art critic-curator who, in a bid for economic and emotional stability, takes a job working on an exhibition for a billionaire’s utopian community, ensconced beneath a geodesic dome on a remote island, safe from the effects of any global polycrisis. Working in the tradition of another acclaimed critic-novelist, J.G. Ballard, Eastham probes the economic and social architecture of the art world that he has spent so long writing about.
Elvia Wilk, a writer and professor of writing craft at Sarah Lawrence College, also deploys speculative landscapes and forms in her longform work including Oval and the upcoming novel Diagnosis. Drawing on her early days as a design critic, when speculative architecture was all the rage, Wilk’s fiction leans fantastical—a pill that increases generosity, a miasmic illness—as it explores the way power infringes on our lives and bodies.
Below, the three authors got together to discuss the state of the critic-novelist: what they can do with fiction that they can’t with criticism, the struggles of putting the art world on the page, and the terror of literary criticism once they’ve published a novel of their own.
What did you want to be first, a critic or a fiction writer? With the proliferation of forms like autofiction and the braided essay, do you think the distinction is meaningful in 2026?
Chris Kraus: I don’t know anyone who writes criticism who doesn’t write fiction or literary nonfiction or something. I don’t know anyone who is purely a critic. The only person I’ve known like that was the late Michael Silverblatt, and he wasn’t even strictly a critic because he was doing these great interviews. But every meaningful review I can think of is really written by a fellow writer.
Ben Eastham: I’d agree. I don’t think many people start out wanting to be a critic. But it’s a way into a field, of learning a discipline, of engaging with other writers and other artists. I never thought of myself as a critic, really. The title still feels weird when it’s applied to me.
Elvia Wilk: I guess I don’t know what a critic is anymore either. What people ask me a lot is if I’m in art or literature. All of these axes are very confusing to me. It didn’t really ever occur to me that I wasn’t supposed to do all of them. The more I encounter this question of why I do one or the other, the more recalcitrant I get. “Why not?” And I double down.
I think sometimes what you write about is just because of a time in your life and practical questions. Can you travel to art shows? Fiction is cool because you can do it anywhere.
Eastham: Did you ever think of that distinction between fiction and criticism, Chris? It never occurred to me. I actually started writing about music, and then I ended up writing about art. It was just a way of being in that world that I found exciting. I never thought about taking different approaches or having a different style.
Kraus: I started writing criticism mostly by being read more in the art world than in the literary world. I was teaching in an art program, so most of the people I was seeing and talking to were visual artists, and the way of visiting would be, Come over and do a studio visit. It’s the most intimate thing you can do, practically, a way of talking to someone through their work. So it just seemed completely organic and natural that I would write about people’s art. And it paid, whereas writing fiction at the time didn’t pay at all.
Then I got more serious about it. In the beginning, it was a lark and I was surprised that these magazines were even asking me to write criticism because I knew so little about visual art. So I would just take it in any direction that I wanted to go: “fictocriticism,” as it was called then.
But at a certain point, I got more serious about it when people started asking me to write these big catalog essays for important museum shows. I thought, Okay, maybe it’s time to grow up and try to put on the hat of a real critic. I made a conscious effort to do that for a little while, then I got bored with it. So at this point, when people ask me to write about art, I choose to only do conversations. That feels like a more natural way of going about it.
Eastham: What did it feel like to be a “real” critic?
Kraus: It was a lot of work, and it was never adjacent to something that I was writing about as a fiction writer. When I was playing at it, I could always write a piece that I could somehow twist and turn in a way that sort of folds into what I’m trying to write at the moment.
Wilk: I felt the same about that. I started writing criticism because I was an artist in college, and my favorite thing to do was studio visits. Then it became suspicious how much I enjoyed talking about art rather than making art. Eventually I got invited to write about people’s work. After a few years, though, it started to feel like service-oriented writing. I was just trying to produce a lot of reviews for money. And then I thought, I need a private thing. I need a secret, and that’s why I started writing fiction.
When did you start, Ben, with your book?
Eastham: I suppose that the book was an attempt to write all the things I couldn’t fit into my criticism. I like that you can do that with novels, that they are capacious: You can write in all these different registers and tones, can play with language and its forms. There’s a certain responsibility with criticism, to the artist or the writer about whose work you’re writing, that imposes constraints.
Kraus: Do you find that it’s harder to write a book review than an art review?
Eastham: I find book reviews easier to write, but I think they’re less rewarding. I find writing about the visual arts exciting because you have to move into language the experience of something that exists outside language. That’s a fun and frightening act of interpretation. To work out how to do that without pinning the work down, or without reducing it to a set of formulae or imposing yourself upon it is challenging. But it’s an adventure; it opens up space.
Wilk: I find it much harder to write about books now because I am writing fiction, I’m teaching fiction, I read fiction all the time. And I think I’ve become so interested or embroiled in the questions of craft. You discover a new set of terms and a new lingua franca. I feel like it makes me a better book critic, but I get myself in a tangle because I’m trying to learn from other writers as much as I’m trying to evaluate what they’re doing from a critical perspective.
Chris, do you write about books a lot right now?
Kraus: I do. I’ve abandoned pretty much writing art reviews, but I still do book reviews. I find them much, much harder than art reviews. Maybe because it’s closer.
I don’t really know that much about art at all, and I can extrapolate just from looking at the thing. It’s more free-form. But I’m so hyper-conscientious when reviewing a book. It takes weeks. I read it again and again, underlining the notes. It’s very weighted in a way that writing about art isn’t. Like you say, Ben, it’s more abstract, and in a way, it could be anything. Nobody’s gonna call you on it.
Eastham: Elvia, you talked about the lingua franca of the literary world. As someone who came to the art world from a different cultural and intellectual background, I was very intrigued to learn how it spoke. Writing criticism requires not only that you encounter the work, but that you understand and can challenge the rhetorical infrastructure that surrounds it and gives it meaning.
A lot of my criticism has been about negotiating between those two positions: the felt experience and the intellectual architecture. Gauging my encounter with the work against the language that surrounds the production of contemporary art and is presumed to give it value.
Another way of putting it is that there is a huge amount of bullshit, most of it produced out of intellectual anxiety, to cut through. But there is also a great deal that is deeply rewarding and genuinely radical in its scope and vision.
Wilk: Ben, your book is so fantastic at describing art world encounters in a way that doesn’t feel pat, and it doesn’t feel mocking, and it doesn’t feel distanced. It’s from the inside out, which is so important when writing about the world that we live in. You’re looking at the social world. But there’s also just beautiful works of imaginary art criticism in it. It’s like speculative art criticism.
Eastham: I learned so much of that from Chris’s writing, to be honest. I remember reading Torpor and being so enamored by the way that its descriptions of photographs taken by the narrator were interleaved into the narrative. This way of zooming in and zooming out and using different registers in writing. Taking advantage of the different styles and modes in which a writer of criticism or journalism is adept.
Kraus: Oh, thank you. One thing in art writing is they often invite you to write alongside the work as opposed to a full-on straightforward critical piece. There was one museum in Europe somewhere that had Mark von Schlegell, the writer, write a novel instead of a catalog essay. The art world welcomes that, a parallel, because nobody really knows how to articulate things in visual art. It’s completely up for grabs in a way. I could never imagine that for a book review.
Eastham: On that theme as well, I think one of the many things I loved about Oval, which is such a great book, Elvia, was how you wove a series of imagined artworks and architectural proposals into the narrative. That strikes me as one of the great excitements of writing a novel like that: You get to invent all of these artworks that in some way pay homage to others or build upon the ideas you’ve been reading. Did you enjoy getting to speculate in that way?
Wilk: Yeah, it’s great. You get to pretend to be an artist for a minute, but you don’t really need materials. Chris knows I love her work because I reviewed her last book, and I was thinking about reviewing as ways of having the conversations you want to have in the world. That’s why I liked studio visits in the first place.
Eastham: To be honest, that’s the part I like least. It’s a temperamental thing. I find studio visits uncomfortable. I don’t always want to peek behind the curtain, any more than I’d want a reviewer of my novel to come and visit me when I’m halfway through the first draft and tearing my hair out.
I think it’s important to say that there are different types of criticism, different types of critics, speaking to different audiences and to different purposes. John Berger distinguishes between the public critic and the studio critic. The studio critic provides a service to the artist and to the scene, responding to new work and feeding back on it. The critic is kind of a collaborator with the artist.
I’ve never felt like that. I’ve always written for people outside the [art] world. I’ve never really been interested in, or even liked, the idea that an artist would read what I’ve written about their work.
Wilk: That’s so funny. For the first few years I was writing, I was only ever writing about my friends. I just didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to do that.
Kraus: If they weren’t my friend, I probably wouldn’t be writing about them.
Ursula K. Le Guin, when asked to briefly sum up one of her works, said, “If I could explain it non-metaphorically, I wouldn’t have written all of these words.” Has a piece of writing ever emerged from something that you couldn’t express rhetorically?
Wilk: I have a strong rhetorical bent and feel a need to close things down and control them, which I fight against all the time. I think some of that is because writing about other people’s work made me feel like I needed to cover all the bases to do a good job, and I’m working against that now. But I do have a pretty strong streak towards argumentation—I want to construct an argument with no holes.
There’s that bad advice to write what you know. You don’t know what you know, so you write to figure it out. And then you rewrite. There’s a place in the revision process between knowing too little and too much.
Eastham: Working professionally as a critic and, before that, as a journalist, means that I am used to tight deadlines. Writing for the paper now [Eastham began writing art criticism for The Guardian in March], I go to see the exhibition in the morning and I have to file in the afternoon. That brings its own demands, that determine an approach.
Wilk: For so long I was writing so fast and so many pieces, and I started a novel because I felt like I just needed to hold onto something for a long time. But now I miss writing quickly because making books is so insanely slow. I started writing a blog.
How do you relate to genre? Ben and Elvia, you are in the speculative fiction realm, while people often attach the label of “autofiction” to you Chris, whether you claim it or not.
Kraus: I feel like every book I’ve written has [had] to find its own shape, and that’s part of writing the book. I’ve never liked the term autofiction, and I’ve certainly never related it to my own work. Sometimes I’ve written in the first person and there’s always the presence of the writer, and sometimes I have a character who’s an avatar for me, but it’s never the central character. My avatar is there as a witness leading the reader through the story, at least in the last two or three books.
I think what takes so long for me with a book is finding exactly where it needs to come from and what the form will be. The last two books, actually, I tried to borrow a little bit from genre writing, especially from crime genre writing. I’m looking with longing right now towards speculative fiction, reading a lot of it and wondering how people do it and thinking that, maybe it’s the next place to go.
Wilk: I hope you do. Come over. It just never occurred to me to write realist fiction until it was too late. My first job was as an architecture critic, and speculative architecture was a really big thing at the time—speculative urbanism, coming up with buildings that would never exist. I was so fascinated with this idea, these unrealized buildings and imaginary spaces. It seemed quite natural to try and create something that didn’t exist. That’s all fiction is in the first place.
Eastham: This is really interesting to hear, because it never occurred to me that I was writing speculative fiction. I was trying to write realism! But the world we live in has gone so mad that any faithful account of it must be in some comparable sense unreal or fantastic or unmoored. I was trying to communicate what it really feels like to be alive in the present.
In order to create that sense of bewilderment, I had to invent some structures and employ some devices and play with language. But that’s not for the sake of style or genre, it’s because that was the only way I could find to get across to the reader the feeling I had.
Are there things that you can do with language in fiction that you can’t in criticism?
Wilk: If we’re lucky, we can do anything in criticism, but if criticism means something that an art magazine is going to publish as a review, no. Only lately have I started to really realize how much you can do in fiction, and stretching it as far as I can.
I’ve published some essays the last two years that start as essays and become fiction. Or, if they’re essays, then they’re full of lies. It’s not autofiction. It’s an essay by someone else. I find myself struggling to know how to explain that or knowing what magazine section it should go in.
Eastham: As a critic, it’s simply helpful to be on the other side of the conversation. Suddenly you have to explain what you are doing and why, and the truth is I don’t really know. That’s something I’m only slowly working out in retrospect.
I didn’t know when I was writing the book what I was doing. There was no goal beyond expressing a feeling and developing an idea. It was a reminder to me that artists don’t—or shouldn’t—know precisely what they are doing, or be thinking about categories, or about how their work might “land.” Leave that to the critics. It’s the job of critics to make the strange libidinal products of artists comprehensible to others, to talk of movements and genres. But the writing of a novel or the production of an artwork should be independent of those things, I think.
Kraus: I think maybe one thing that’s changed a little bit since the de-professionalization of criticism is not many people writing criticism seem to take it on their shoulders to look at the work and use it to extrapolate about some moment in the world, in the culture, and this is something that critics very commonly used to do.
I went back to something I was writing recently to Rosalind Krauss [an art critic and the founder and editor of the academic journal October] when she was writing about early video art. Her ideas about narcissism and video were very clear, very definitive. This was a philosophical argument that she was putting forward. It was not soft. It was not diffuse. And I think criticism now, especially as written by all of us who are artists and writers ourselves, is a lot softer and more diffuse for better and for worse.
Wilk: It’s both sides. The hot take-ification of everything is often the opposite of a considered reflection on what something means right now. I think what you’re saying is very true. I think it’s because we don’t have time to develop those ideas. Things always have to be urgent.
Kraus: And maybe it’s not our job either. Being a professional critic was closer to being a philosopher than to being a writer or an artist.
Eastham: Critics don’t have that space in a single piece any longer. That’s hard to imagine. But I do think they could develop an idea or a set of ideas or principles, and set out a position over a career—the course of many pieces, over a long time. I certainly think about that—and I imagine you do from your writing, Elvia—that one piece leads into another.
Wilk: That’s how I ended up writing a book of essays. I thought it was gonna be a collection, but then I was like, “I’d rather just rewrite them all so they fit together.” I guess that’s back to my overwriting problem. But yes, I think what’s cool about writing a lot of criticism quickly is that you can develop this narrative arc, or some kind of cohesion that you can see after the fact. And you get to practice a lot. When writing longer-form stuff that doesn’t already have a place in the discourse machine as a review or something, it’s hard to know how to practice day by day. I’m trying to invent a practice that isn’t so much about a product.
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