Jennifer Wilson

We Got Next

By treating the league as a sisterhood or a worthwhile cause, a new documentary about the WNBA risks dulling its competitive edge. 

The Point Guard

“Even though my job is mostly to stay home and read, I like to be out in the world absorbing as much as I can so I don’t miss references or fall behind the rhythms of life that new writers are trying to capture.”

Mother Russia

In Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s latest novel, Kidnapped, Soviet bureaucracy is made all the messier by maternal desperation.

The Agony of Sophia Tolstoy

Frederick Wiseman resurrects the wife of the famed Russian writer only to reduce her to the sum of her grievances.

The First Russian

An unfinished novel about his African great-grandfather provides the best sense of how Pushkin considered his own Blackness.

From the Battlefield to ‘Little Women’

Louisa May Alcott’s letters home from the front lines, later published as Hospital Sketches (1863), proved that her true gift lay not in inventing new worlds, but in observing the one around her.