Literature

Desperately Not Seeking Susan

“The strong feelings about Sontag were exactly what I dreaded when I was first asked to do the biography. If I’d cared too much about that, I couldn’t have written it.”

January 2, 2021

The Imperial Gardener

How Joseph Banks made the royal garden at Kew the most outstanding botanical collection in the world.

January 14, 2021 issue

The People’s Novel

Peter Weiss makes a passionate case that for the poor, communism offered access to spiritual and intellectual realms from which they had historically been excluded.

January 14, 2021 issue

Deadly Myths

Magic, reality, and violence against women in Fernanda Melchor’s ‘Hurricane Season.’

January 14, 2021 issue

A Month in the Life

A new edition of Bernadette Mayer’s Memory helps us rediscover a poet whose experiments create a new relationship between poem and reader.

January 14, 2021 issue

The Prophet of Maximum Productivity

Thorstein Veblen’s maverick economic ideas made him the foremost iconoclast of the Age of Iconoclasts.

January 14, 2021 issue

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

Alison Lurie (1926–2020)

The late novelist and critic was a brilliant deflator of pretension and a compassionate friend.

January 14, 2021 issue

The Poet and the Reader: Nobel Lecture 2020

January 14, 2021 issue

The Mystery of the Missing Viola

A parable of the prodigal player whose instrument was lost and now is found.

December 1, 2020