Biography & Memoir

Family Lore

In her latest book, Marina Warner uses her skills as a mythographer to tell the story of her parents’ lives in postwar Cairo.

September 22, 2022 issue

David Motadel

My Husband the War Criminal

Nancy Dougherty’s The Hangman and His Wife portrays Reinhard Heydrich as a cold, apolitical technocrat while downplaying his ideological commitment to Nazism.

September 22, 2022 issue

Joyce Carol Oates

Disaster Was Her Element

Miranda Seymour’s I Used to Live Here Once is a richly detailed and warmly sympathetic look at Jean Rhys’s turbulent, disjointed life.

September 22, 2022 issue

Christine Henneberg

The Good Mother

Jazmina Barrera and Angela Garbes consider the emotional and political fallout of pregnancy and motherhood.

August 18, 2022 issue

Cintra Wilson

Downtown Confessional

John Lurie’s memoir is a tell-all that settles old accounts and names names, a cantankerous lament over his many existential and terrestrial irritations.

August 18, 2022 issue

Roya Hakakian

The Refugee’s Internal Exile

Our family had to flee Iran after 1979 and settle in the US, but in his imagination my father never left. Only I, by burying him here, have put down roots that he lost.

March 20, 2022

Joyce Johnson

Jack Kerouac’s Journey

For On the Road’s author, whose centenary is this month, it was a struggle to write, then a struggle to live with its fame. “My work is found, my life is lost,” he wrote.

March 2, 2022

Melissa Chadburn

A True Crime

After murder came with shocking suddenness to my small town, I started questioning the storytelling ethics of a genre in which I myself had a stake.

January 22, 2022

The Latest

Joshua Cohen

Lucky Guy

Jared Kushner’s anti-ideological ideology is to get the best deal for whomever he represents—the business he was born into, the business he married into, and, most of all, himself.

October 20, 2022 issue

Leslie Jamison

The Bear’s Kiss

What do we learn when the boundaries between humans and animals collapse?

October 20, 2022 issue

Mark Ford

‘An Age of Prudence’

On the centenary of The Waste Land, the archives continue to yield new information about Eliot and his life.

October 20, 2022 issue

Frances Wilson

Agatha Christie’s Nightmares

Lucy Worsley’s biography spans a long career driven by an almost addictive need to write.

October 20, 2022 issue

Caroline Fraser

Trouble in River City

Two recent books examine the idea of the Midwest as a haven for white supremacy and patriarchy.

October 20, 2022 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Keep Your Eye on the Kid

Buster Keaton made his own kind of sense out of the perplexities of existence in ways baffling to those among whom he found himself.

October 20, 2022 issue

Neal Ascherson

Hugging the Shores

Colin Thubron’s latest travelogue takes him down the Amur River and through the borderlands between Russia and China.

October 20, 2022 issue

Christopher Benfey

Emerson & His ‘Big Brethren’

“‘You are yourself a sequoia,’ John Muir told Emerson during the philosopher’s trip to California in 1871. ‘Stop and get acquainted with your big brethren.’”

October 20, 2022 issue

Susanna Moore

‘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

Hermione Lee

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