Literature

Biography & Memoir

The Passion of Martha Graham

In a new biography, Deborah Jowitt meticulously describes Graham’s pioneering dances, but brushes lightly over Graham’s fervid, turbulent personal relationships, and the importance she ascribed to passion and sexual pleasure.

May 9, 2024 issue

Daphne Merkin

The Way She Was

“I never thought I was great,” Barbra Streisand writes in her capacious memoir, but the truth seems to be that for a large part of her life she has flirted with the possibility that she was.

April 4, 2024 issue

Andrew Delbanco

A Hell of a Performance

Norman Mailer wrote with an unstable mixture of self-indulgence and self-awareness, bravado and diffidence, glibness and bracing honesty, macho posturing and an almost sheepish gentleness.

April 18, 2024 issue

Jerome Groopman

Seeing the Power in Blindness

A writer narrating his increasing loss of vision asks fundamental questions about sight and cognition.

April 18, 2024 issue

David A. Bell

Piety & Power

A lively biography of Marie de Vignerot, the niece, confidante, and heiress of Cardinal Richelieu, sheds light on the religious passions and political intrigues of seventeenth-century France.

April 4, 2024 issue

David A. Bell

In My Mother’s Archive

Researching my mother’s friendships with Truman Capote and Elizabeth Bishop, her love affair with Dylan Thomas, and her own writing career, I discovered that she had led a courageous early life.

February 20, 2024

Sasha Frere-Jones

Intentionality

I remember wanting to be in a band when I was nine.

October 8, 2023

Jessica Riskin

Every Creeping Thing

In his late writings and correspondence, Charles Darwin was thinking about how mortal beings strive to make what they can of themselves.

March 21, 2024 issue

Milan Kundera (1929–2023)

Milan Kundera

The Czech Wager

January 22, 1981 issue

Milan Kundera

The Tragedy of Central Europe

April 26, 1984 issue

Milan Kundera

The Novel and Europe

July 19, 1984 issue

Milan Kundera

‘Man Thinks, God Laughs’

June 13, 1985 issue

Milan Kundera

The Umbrella, the Night World, and the Lonely Moon

December 19, 1991 issue

Milan Kundera

You’re Not in Your Own House Here, My Dear Fellow

September 21, 1995 issue

The Latest

Brenda Wineapple

Stifled Rage

Louisa May Alcott worked obsessively to become a successful writer, which meant that despite her gift for tart observation she often retreated into homilies and platitudes.

April 18, 2024 issue

Miranda Seymour

A Hectic Life

The bicentenary of Lord Byron’s death is an opportunity to ask what a witty dandy with the flamboyant attitudes of a raucously chauvinistic age can offer today’s world.

April 4, 2024 issue

Frances Wilson

‘Diabolical Fame’

Composed of rhapsody and opinionation, without shape or chronology, Roger Lewis’s biography of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton tries to get at the strangeness of stardom.

March 21, 2024 issue

J. Hoberman

Outsider’s Outsider

At once famous and obscure, marginal and central, Harry Smith anticipated and even invented several important elements of Sixties counterculture.

March 21, 2024 issue

Meghan O’Gieblyn

The Trouble with Reality

William Egginton’s intellectual biography of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg takes place at the intersection of physics and religion, and traces the errors that result when we forget the limits of our human point of view.

March 21, 2024 issue

Peter Brooks

In Search of His Vocation

The best description of In Search of Lost Time may come from what Proust calls dreams in its opening pages: “a formidable game with time.”

March 21, 2024 issue

Jé Wilson

Ducks in the Drawing Room

The disorienting vitality of Barbara Comyns’s novels is one reason they tend to be forgotten and revived every few decades.

March 7, 2024 issue

Dan Nadel

Cartoon Rules

Bill Griffith’s Three Rocks is a portrait of an artist obsessed with the formal mechanics of the comic strip.

March 7, 2024 issue

John Banville

‘Live All You Can’

The early lives of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James were marked by the loss of loved ones, and in their reflections one finds a characteristically nineteenth-century American sense of resilience and regeneration.

March 7, 2024 issue

Josephine Quinn

The Thrill of Late Antiquity

The historian Peter Brown’s memoir recounts an academic career that has taken him from Oxford to Iran to California, in a nostalgic portrait of twentieth-century academic life that can still offer a primer to young scholars.

March 7, 2024 issue