Biography & Memoir

Performance as Immolation

The conductor Carlos Kleiber’s aesthetic was founded on the interplay between voluptuous refinement and an impulse to violence.

February 23, 2023 issue

Hermione Lee

The Soft-Power Brokers

A new history focusing on the English Rothschilds tells how the women were centrally involved in business, politics, social welfare, and culture—all while caught between the advantages of wealth and the burdens of anti-Semitism and sexism.

February 23, 2023 issue

Ben Lerner

The Faces of Victor Serge

The radical writer’s novels are unsettling explorations of the tension between individual and collective life.

January 19, 2023 issue

Alastair Macaulay

The Encyclopedia of the Dance

The first full-length biography of Bronislava Nijinska does long-overdue justice to one of the twentieth century’s great women artists.

January 19, 2023 issue

Corey Robin

The Trouble with Money

John Maynard Keynes thought that in forgetting that money is a means and not an end, we abandon the reality of the present for the fiction of the future.

December 22, 2022 issue

Simon Callow

Ol’ Blue Eyes

Paul Newman’s posthumous memoir is a many-sided self-interrogation by a man who was a mystery to himself.

December 22, 2022 issue

Victoria Baena

A Great Variety of Selves

In a new play based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Emma Corrin plays a young aristocrat who swaps milieus, costumes, countries, and genders.

January 10, 2023

Christopher Benfey

Later Disregard

I just turned sixty-eight.

November 16, 2022

Jason Epstein (1928–2022)

Jason Epstein

The Chicago Conspiracy Trial: Allen Ginsberg on the Stand

Ginsberg’s testimony meant to imply that the official reaction to the Festival of Life was an unusually violent form of theatrical censorship, an example of the ageless assault upon the lamb of truth by the wolf of custom.

February 12, 1970 issue

Jason Epstein

The Last Days of New York

What brought New York City to bankruptcy?

February 19, 1976 issue

Jason Epstein

Publishing: The Revolutionary Future

Social networking may expose readers to this or that book but violates the solitude required to create artificial worlds with real people in them.

March 11, 2010 issue

Jason Epstein

A Strike and a Start

It was at that dinner that Elizabeth Hardwick, her husband Robert Lowell, Barbara and I saw all at once the opportunity that would become The New York Review of Books.

March 16, 2013

Geoffrey O’Brien

Joe Brainard’s Communal Intimacy

While Brainard’s recurring subject was himself, he somehow kept himself at a distance, an object in a world of other bodies.

April 20, 2023 issue

John Banville

Special Correspondent

As a public man, John le Carré was a model of probity and rectitude; in his private life, he was not above double-dealing.

April 20, 2023 issue

Miranda Seymour

Consider the Publisher

Behind Mary Wollstonecraft was a courageous publisher and his network of eighteenth-century London’s most radical minds.

April 20, 2023 issue

Negar Azimi

Wilder, Riskier, More Generous

A new collection demonstrates that Cookie Mueller was not just another avant-garde It Girl of the downtown scene, but a writer of rare voice and imagination.

April 20, 2023 issue

Frances Wilson

Descriptions of a Struggle

Kafka’s diaries—made up of false starts, stray thoughts, self-doubts, internal dialogues, dreams, doodles, aphorisms, drafts of stories, character sketches, and scenes from family life—are often very funny.

April 6, 2023 issue

Martin Filler

The Architect of Subtraction

Adolf Loos’s radical designs pared down architecture to its most basic elements.

April 6, 2023 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

An Exceptional Witness

The Holocaust survivor Stella Levi recalls growing up in the Jewish community of Rhodes before its destruction by the Nazis.

April 6, 2023 issue

Susan Neiman

Longing for Reconciliation

The philosopher Jacob Taubes was torn between the desire to heal the split between Judaism and Christianity— particularly between Germans and Jews—and his doubts that it was possible.

April 6, 2023 issue