Literature

Biography & Memoir

Alice Munro’s Retreat

In the years after she chose to stay with her husband despite learning that he had abused her daughter Andrea, Alice Munro’s stories came to reveal more than she might have known.

December 5, 2024 issue

Sarah L. Kaufman

Limitless Space, Endless Motion

When the choreographer Alexei Ratmansky first saw a tape of Balanchine’s Apollo, he watched in disbelief. Here was elegance without exaggeration, tension and beauty without stagy excess.

January 16, 2025 issue

Deborah Eisenberg

Urgent Messages from Eternity

An exhibition of Franz Kafka’s postcards, letters, and manuscript pages rekindles our sense of him as a writer deeply connected to his own time and place.

February 13, 2025 issue

Robert O. Paxton

De Gaulle’s Gamble

After the defeat of 1940, Charles de Gaulle was convinced that even a minor contribution to the war against the Axis would assure France’s place among the victors.

February 13, 2025 issue

Elaine Blair

Far from the Seventies

Two memoirs by women remembering their youthful relationships with older men complicate the definition and implications of “consent.”

January 16, 2025 issue

Darryl Pinckney

Baldwin’s Spell

In James Baldwin’s writing and public appearances, the social and personal, the spoken and written dissolve into one.

January 16, 2025 issue

Frances Wilson

Irresistible Iris

Iris Murdoch’s readers return to her to understand the relationship between high intelligence, erotic extremism, and moral virtue.

December 19, 2024 issue

Jonathan Freedland

A Feigned Reluctance

Rory Stewart, in his recent memoir, observes with detachment what is ludicrous in politics—even when he’s near the center of it.

December 5, 2024 issue

The Latest

Madeleine Thien

Killing Memories

The Chinese writer Fang Fang’s novel Soft Burial probes traumatic national memories across several generations, even as her Covid diary in 2020 made her the target of a relentless disinformation campaign in China.

May 15, 2025 issue

Vivian Gornick

The 176-Year Argument

At the University of Chicago all they wanted to know was, What’s the theory? At Yale all they wanted to know was, What’s the technique? At City College of New York all they wanted to know was, How does this relate to real life?

April 24, 2025 issue

Francine Prose

Poisoning the Family Tree

Joe Dunthorne’s Children of Radium is an account of his search for information about his great-grandfather, a German Jewish scientist who helped develop chemical weapons for the Nazis.

April 24, 2025 issue

Thomas Powers

A Mighty Theme

Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is “the Moby-Dick of the plains”—the great book about the American West.

April 24, 2025 issue

Benjamin Nathans

The Enigma of George Kennan

Frank Costigliola’s biography of George Kennan explores the contrast between the supreme confidence of his policy prescriptions and the perpetual turbulence of his inner life.

April 24, 2025 issue

Cathleen Schine

Ungovernable, Capricious Life

In Hanif Kureishi’s astonishing memoir of his life after the fall that left him tetraplegic, the sense of vulnerability is crushing, but it’s also part of what makes the writing so intimate.

April 10, 2025 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Living Wide

Foster Hirsch’s Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties is an implicit memoir, revisiting his experience of a staggering array of films and the world in which they emerged.

April 10, 2025 issue

Colm Tóibín

‘Her Own Woman’

In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy created herself on the page—and then reimagined the self she had established.

March 13, 2025

Jed Perl

Echoes of Eternity

The critic Arlene Croce found in classical ballet timeless values in a timely form, but she looked to modern dance for the reverse: timely values taking on a timeless form.

March 27, 2025 issue