Michael Gorra

The Sense of an Ending

On Don DeLillo’s late style.

The Silence

by Don DeLillo

December 3, 2020 issue

The Suspicion of Expertise

November 5, 2020 issue

St. Peter’s Cemetery, site of William Faulkner’s grave, Oxford, Mississippi, 1982

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.”

August 28, 2020

Constance Fenimore Woolson; engraving circa 1875

Constance Fenimore Woolson: Sketches from Solitude

Constance Fenimore Woolson: Collected Stories

edited by Anne Boyd Rioux

July 23, 2020 issue

Young Woman from the Provinces

Benjamin Moser’s ‘Sontag: Her Life and Work’

Sontag: Her Life and Work

by Benjamin Moser

February 27, 2020 issue

Workers removing a statute of Confederate general Robert E. Lee from Robert E. Lee Park (now Turtle Park), Dallas, Texas, September 2017

A Heritage of Evil

Three books dealing with memory and historical witness

Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

by Susan Neiman

Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide

by Tony Horwitz

Remembering Emmett Till

by Dave Tell

November 7, 2019 issue

Loving with a Stiff Upper Lip

The Only Story

by Julian Barnes

July 19, 2018 issue

Southern Discomfort

Peter Taylor: Complete Stories, Vol. 1, 1938–1959

by Peter Taylor, edited by Ann Beattie

Peter Taylor: Complete Stories, Vol. 2, 1960–1992

by Peter Taylor, edited by Ann Beattie

March 22, 2018 issue

Review

Brenda Wineapple

Modernist, Humanist, Compromised Faulkner

Faulkner’s chroniclers have to reconcile the novelist’s often repellent political positions with the extraordinary meditations on race, violence, and cruelty in his fiction.

January 14, 2021 issue

Claire Messud, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2013

Shaping Stories to Make Sense of Ourselves

The Burning Girl

by Claire Messud

September 28, 2017 issue

The Nose of the Master

For Henry James’s seventieth birthday in 1913 a group of his admirers commissioned John Singer Sargent to paint him.

July 22, 2017

David Szalay at the museum and former home of the poet Julio Flórez, Usiacurí, Colombia, January 2014

Nine Lives

All That Man Is

by David Szalay

June 22, 2017 issue

Edith Wharton, circa 1901; photograph by Zaida Ben-Yusuf

Losing the American Tone

Four Novels of the 1920s: The Glimpses of the Moon, A Son at the Front, Twilight Sleep, The Children

by Edith Wharton, edited by Hermione Lee

May 25, 2017 issue

The Portrait of Miss Bart

For a century and more readers have found an awful fascination in watching Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.

May 1, 2015

Donald Antrim, New York City, September 2014; photograph by Larry Fink

The Girl at the Florist’s

The Emerald Light in the Air

by Donald Antrim

February 19, 2015 issue

Jan Van Eyck: The Arnolfini Wedding, circa 1435

Deep into Green

The history and meaning of a color

Green: The History of a Color

by Michel Pastoureau, translated from the French by Jody Gladding

September 25, 2014 issue

Elizabeth Spencer, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, late 1990s

The Brilliant Explorations of Elizabeth Spencer

Starting Over: Stories

by Elizabeth Spencer

May 22, 2014 issue

All Blue

The real subject of William Gass’s On Being Blue is language itself, which he sees as glorious to the exact degree that it is also inadequate, unable to sustain an immediate relation between a word on the one hand and its arbitrary and yet indissoluble referent on the other.

February 18, 2014

Daring

The Lowland

by Jhumpa Lahiri

October 24, 2013 issue

An Inventory of Inhumanity

Middle C

by William H. Gass

April 4, 2013 issue