Biography & Memoir

Becoming Amartya Sen

In his memoir Home in the World the pathbreaking economist and moral philosopher looks back on his much-traveled, multicultural childhood, education, and early academic career.

December 8, 2022 issue

Lynn Hunt

‘A Great Democratic Revolution’

Alexis de Tocqueville left France to study the American prison system and returned with the material that would become “Democracy in America.”

December 8, 2022 issue

Lucy Sante

Models for Being

A meditative essay on friendship weaves through Hua Hsu’s memoir, which is also about youth, Asian identity, zines, time, education, California, mixtapes, and more.

November 24, 2022 issue

Andrew Raftery

Clay Genius

A master of the punishing mercy of the kiln, Josiah Wedgwood set his stamp on European decorative arts and changed ceramics forever with the clay and glazes he invented or perfected.

November 24, 2022 issue

Jenny Uglow

Hilary Mantel (1952–2022)

Hilary Mantel’s novels and short stories demonstrated that while the historical record can tell us what people did, only fiction can imagine what they felt and thought.

November 24, 2022 issue

Clair Wills

Family Lore

In her latest book, Marina Warner uses her skills as a mythographer to tell the story of her parents’ lives in postwar Cairo.

September 22, 2022 issue

Susanna Moore

‘Write It Again’

Very rarely, over the sixty years I knew Joan Didion, would she say something helpful if I asked her advice.

September 28, 2022

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

Rebecca Giggs

The Sea, the Sea

Rachel Carson’s ocean books reveal an author profoundly engaged with the problem of how to convey ecological knowledge—and how to decenter human life.

December 22, 2022 issue

Merve Emre

Making It Big

In Roald Dahl’s stories, cruelty begets cruelty, children grow large, adults grow small, and everyone is trapped in a fun house of dirty, depthless mirrors.

December 22, 2022 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

Anahid Nersessian

A Vivisectional Style

A new biography of John Donne argues for the sensuality and strangeness of both his work and his life.

November 24, 2022 issue

Ishion Hutchinson

Far Away

When I moved from Kingston to New York, V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival became part of my internal rhythm of resistance in the city, my bulwark against losing the gift of fantasy.

October 21, 2022

James Gleick

Space-Age Magus

From beginning to end, experts saw through Buckminster Fuller’s ideas and theories. Why did so many people come under his spell?

November 3, 2022 issue

Brenda Wineapple

Living in Words

A new biography explores the life and work of the influential abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who wrote prodigiously about the social, political, and cultural issues of her time.

November 3, 2022 issue

John Banville

‘A God Can Do It’

For Rilke, the artist’s task is to absorb the realm of things and thereby transform it into something rich and strange.

November 3, 2022 issue

Merve Emre

The Illusion of the First Person

A historical survey of the personal essay shows it to be the purest expression of the lie that individual subjectivity exists prior to the social formations that gave rise to it.

November 3, 2022 issue