Literature

Last Poem

a poem

October 20, 2022 issue

Alcaraz vs. Cilic

a poem

October 20, 2022 issue

‘Write It Again’

Very rarely, over the sixty years I knew Joan Didion, would she say something helpful if I asked her advice.

September 28, 2022

Passage

a poem

October 6, 2022 issue

Poet of the Dispossessed

Joseph Roth was unwavering in his passion for the vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire, which inspired his greatest novel, his hatred of nationalism, and his prophetic and courageous loathing for the Nazis. About everything else, as a new biography shows, he had violently mixed feelings.

October 6, 2022 issue

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.

October 6, 2022 issue

Doomed to Lucidity

Though Andrew Miller is a master of traditional narrative, he has struggled to escape the formulas of his fiction.

October 6, 2022 issue

Little Town on the Prairie

Liang Hong’s best-selling account of returning to her home village inspired an outpouring of Chinese nonfiction about the country’s immense social changes.

October 6, 2022 issue

Timeless Correspondences

The great salutary effect of reading H.D.’s novels and memoirs— many brought out late in life or posthumously— is to restore her to her era.

October 6, 2022 issue

Cosmic Oceans Squeezed into Atoms

The idiosyncratic wisdom of the Tirukkural’s poetry is about aliveness, perhaps the most elusive of human goals.

October 6, 2022 issue