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

Regina Marler

Culpability and the Culture

In Francine Prose’s memoir 1974, she recounts a brief, intense relationship with one of the men behind the leak of the Pentagon Papers.

September 19, 2024 issue

Colm Tóibín

Haunted by Fiction

In Mark O’Connell’s A Thread of Violence, the murderer Malcolm Macarthur lurks in the gray area between life and literature.

September 19, 2024 issue

David Levi Strauss

Three Kinds of Sun

I never saw my father as comfortable and relaxed as when he was holding a gun.

August 24, 2024

Colm Tóibín

The Pitch of Passion

James Baldwin was fascinated with eloquence itself, the soaring phrase, the rhythm pushed hard, the sharp and glorious ring of a sentence.

August 2, 2024

Leanne Shapton

Crossing to Safety

Diana Nyad has an astonishing ability to do unfathomably difficult, even terrifying athletic feats, and, like many athletes, she did them in the aftermath of abuse.

August 15, 2024 issue

Brenda Wineapple

In Search of the Real Hannah Crafts

The Bondwoman’s Narrative is thought to be the first novel by a Black woman to describe slavery from the inside, but only recently have scholars discovered her true identity.

August 15, 2024 issue

Christopher Benfey

Siding with Ahab

Can we appreciate Herman Melville’s work without attributing to it schemes for the uplift of modern man?

August 15, 2024 issue

Rachel Eisendrath

A Portrait on the Wall

It had not really occurred to me until many years after her death that my grandmother could be considered representative of a whole culture.

July 14, 2024

Anna Leszkiewicz

‘The Small Girl’s Proust’

Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle tends to be read as a romance novel. But beneath its surface charm is a metaliterary inquiry into form, style, and merit.

July 13, 2024

Anne Enright

The High Irish Style

John McGahern sought formality and distance in his prose, but his masterful novels were always underpinned by the difficult realities of his own life.

July 18, 2024 issue