Edward Mendelson

‘She Talk Her Mind’

Zadie Smith’s Wife of Willesden offers an exhilarating counterpoint to the writer’s understanding of character as it emerges in her fiction.

Respecting Second Thoughts

Life, Death, This Moment of June

Mrs. Dalloway has the world-defining ambition and scope of every great epic, from Dante’s Commedia to Goethe’s Faust.

The Only Way to Go

Auden’s ‘Dialectic’

“Auden was fascinated by the unsolvable problem of how much of life is governed by necessity and how much is chosen through freedom.”

Why Apollo Had Little Appeal for Auden

As Apollo 11 was heading for the moon, someone at the Times, possibly managing editor Abe Rosenthal, offered to commission W.H. Auden to write a poem about the meaning of the event. Auden had replied that it would have no meaning at all.

Auden on No-Platforming Pound

In 1945, when Bennett Cerf of Random House was preparing An Anthology of Famous English and American Poetry, he omitted twelve early poems by Ezra Pound included in a 1927 anthology on which the new book had been based. W.H. Auden, one of Cerf’s authors, wrote Cerf some letters about this that may still be clarifying today.

Reading in an Age of Catastrophe

George Hutchinson’s ‘Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s’

What Thucydides Knew About the US Today

In Thucydides’s morally coherent universe, moral action is also, inevitably, practical action, and immoral action is inevitably impractical, no matter how insistently short-sighted strategists pretend that it isn’t. In the two years since the 2016 US election, it seems ever more clear that Thucydides is the greatest historian not only of empire but also of contemporary politics.

What Is the Critic’s Job?

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

New Light on Sandover

The Genius and Generosity of Jimmy Merrill

In the Depths of the Digital Age

Six books look at the newly public world in which practically everyone’s lives are accessible and offered for display

The Threat to the Editorial Institute

A Different T.S. Eliot

Three new books make it possible to see more deeply than before into Eliot’s inner life

Obama as Literary Critic

Barack Obama’s letter to his college girlfriend about T.S. Eliot does what the finest literary criticism has always done.

Lives & Loves of the Exile

Malamud’s Secrets

‘My Grasping, Greedy American Soul’