Michael Gorra

Who Are These People?

In The Pole, J. M. Coetzee returns to the novelist's ethical and aesthetic imperative: to attempt to understand others for whom we may not, at first, feel much sympathy.

Table Talk

Playing with the Past

The Fraud, Zadie Smith’s first historical novel, asks if we might all be frauds of some sort, wearing masks and performing as people who are not quite ourselves.

Having the Last Word

The sketches in Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures are as close as she ever came to the autobiography she wouldn’t or couldn’t write.

Late Style

“I’m interested in the shapes of careers, in the way that one book answers and builds on its predecessors, responds to the shelf that’s stretched out behind it.”

Language, Destroyer of Worlds

In what may be his final two novels, Cormac McCarthy has assembled a family chronicle out of fragments, one that has, for the first time in his oeuvre, characters with an interior life and a meaningful past.

Corrections of Taste

Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries traces a shift in English studies in which close attention to language, rather than literary history, became the paradigm for criticism.

Being Dickens

Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Turning Point minutely conveys the texture of Charles Dickens’s daily life over the course of a year when he was at the peak of his powers.

What Fear Feels Like

Paul Auster's biography of Stephen Crane captures the life of a writer who found his material in “extreme situations...matters of life and death: war, poverty, and physical danger.”

Promise Miscarried

Christine Smallwood's The Life of the Mind is a campus novel equally obsessed with the life of the body and with the precariousness of academic life.

Philip’s Theater

Philip Roth drew and smudged and drew again the line between life and art, and with every book it became harder to distinguish between them.

The Sense of an Ending

On Don DeLillo's late style.

The Suspicion of Expertise

Jim Crow & William Faulkner

Faulkner didn’t enjoy much local popularity when he was alive, not even after he won the Nobel Prize. He told too many inconvenient truths, and even some of his relatives saw him as writing “dirty books for Yankees.”

Constance Fenimore Woolson: Sketches from Solitude

Young Woman from the Provinces

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work

A Heritage of Evil

Three books dealing with memory and historical witness

Loving with a Stiff Upper Lip

Southern Discomfort

Shaping Stories to Make Sense of Ourselves