Biography & Memoir

Journey to the North

Javier Zamora’s retelling of the almost lethal three-thousand-mile journey he made from El Salvador to the US as a child gives the experience of migration extraordinary immediacy.

June 8, 2023 issue

Joan Acocella

‘The Real World Is Not Here’

Balanchine’s dances often gladden our hearts in order to break them, whereupon they tell us that we have to go on living anyway.

June 8, 2023 issue

Vivian Gornick

Surviving by Accident

With neither cynicism nor sentimentality, Marina Jarre makes us feel the hard, dull ache of the spiritual aloneness that countless lives endure, especially in the shadow of a dramatic world war.

June 8, 2023 issue

Joan Acocella

From Russia, with Love

In her monumental new biography of Balanchine, Jennifer Homans tells the story of the choreographer whose modernist extension of classicism forever altered American dance.

May 25, 2023 issue

Michael Hofmann

Bewitched by Goethe

In Johann Eckermann, Goethe found an amanuensis made in heaven.

May 25, 2023 issue

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

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

Joan Didion, 1934–2021

Joan Didion

Hollywood: Having Fun

March 22, 1973 issue

Joan Didion

New York: Sentimental Journeys

January 17, 1991 issue

Neal Ascherson

Becoming European

Timothy Garton Ash’s Homelands traces the development of his passionate identification with Europe and the continent’s unsteady experiments with unity.

December 21, 2023 issue

Mark O’Connell

Shooting Werner Herzog

The director’s memoir, packed with unlikely incident, suggests that Herzog has always been his own greatest creation.

December 21, 2023 issue

Colm Tóibín

In the Streets of Barcelona

In Antagony, the Spanish writer Luis Goytisolo attempts to imagine a new sort of novel in which the streets have the force of character and urban topography has its own destiny.

December 21, 2023 issue

Sophie Pinkham

Invasion, Day by Day

Yevgenia Belorusets’s War Diary is rigorous in its focus on the interior life, asking what it means to be at home during a war.

December 7, 2023 issue

Edward Chancellor

The Naturalist

In a new biography, Friedrich Hayek emerges as a paradoxical figure: a passionate liberal whose most enthusiastic supporters have been conservative.

December 7, 2023 issue

Dan Chiasson

Louise Glück (1943–2023)

November 23, 2023 issue

Benjamin Moser

The Cost of ‘Order and Progress’

The life of the explorer Cândido Rondon suggests that Brazil might have taken another path—one that avoided the devastation of its ecosystem and the decimation of its indigenous peoples.

November 23, 2023 issue

Vivian Gornick

Camus on Tour

Most of Albert Camus’s evaluations from his promotional trips across the Atlantic are superficial or laughably snotty. What’s intriguing is how quickly he demands that things make sense.

November 23, 2023 issue

Johannes von Moltke

Embracing Anonymity

The critic and novelist Siegfried Kracauer returned repeatedly to anonymity as a theme in his work, and a new biography insists on his desire for anonymity in his life as well.

November 23, 2023 issue