Literature

The Imperfect and Sublime ‘Gatsby’

Amid a life of disappointments, Fitzgerald’s novel was a crowning achievement. I turn to it because it gives me the sober wisdom to revise my own American dream.

January 21, 2021

To Err Is Poetic

The poetry canon is dotted with mistakes large and small; why do some critics seem attached to reading these errors as intentional?

February 11, 2021 issue

‘A Very Lonely Business’

“How any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom,” Virginia Woolf wrote. Is there a tradeoff between motherhood and artistic creativity?

February 11, 2021 issue

Chronicle of a Death Ignored

Becky Cooper’s We Keep the Dead Close is as much a study of corrosive institutional patriarchy as it is an investigation into an unsolved 1969 murder at Harvard.

February 11, 2021 issue

Inheriting Hunger

Émile Zola’s monumental twenty-novel cycle encompasses nearly every sphere of French society, but returns repeatedly to people with a bottomless compulsion to dominate others.

February 11, 2021 issue

A Sickness in the Air

Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind imagines the world after a global disaster, but its real subject is white entitlement.

February 11, 2021 issue

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

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