Biography & Memoir

The Representative

Ilhan Omar’s ability to survive, even thrive, under chaotic conditions appears to have been a harbinger of a taste for political battle.

November 19, 2020 issue

Maggie Doherty

Bella Abzug’s Fight for a Broader Feminism

On the feisty congresswoman’s posthumous return to the spotlight.

November 5, 2020 issue

Vivian Gornick, Greenwich Village, September 2020

Dayna Tortorici

The Desk and the Daring

Vivian Gornick has long enjoyed an audience of literary depressives and feminists. Now, a late-career revival is expanding her readership.

October 8, 2020 issue

Fintan O’Toole

A Moral Witness

Martha Gellhorn’s letters to her lovers and intimate friends involve a remarkable feat of reportage on the war within Gellhorn herself

October 8, 2020 issue

Mark Mazower

Eric Hobsbawm: Clear, Inclusive, Lasting

Eric Hobsbawm’s works themselves are his memorial. What is there to learn from his biography?

July 23, 2020 issue

Thomas Chatterton Williams, New York City, 2019

Darryl Pinckney

Escaping Blackness

Thomas Chatterton Williams’s ‘Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race’

March 26, 2020 issue

Cathleen Schine

It Had to Be Her

Like the stories of most notorious women, Alma Mahler’s is one of sex and power. She had a liking and a talent for both.

January 16, 2020 issue

Edward Snowden; illustration by Joanna Neborsky

Jonathan Lethem

Snowden in the Labyrinth

Edward Snowden’s ‘Permanent Record’

October 24, 2019 issue

The Latest

Hilton Als

An Awful and Beautiful Light

Joan Didion and the granite of the specific.

December 17, 2020 issue

Hermione Lee

An Undisappearing Act

Diane Johnson’s restitutionary biography brings George Meredith’s first wife out of his shadow.

December 3, 2020 issue

Greil Marcus

The Devil Had Nothing to Do With It

“Robert Johnson was one of the most inventive geniuses of all time,” wrote Bob Dylan. “We still haven’t caught up with him.”

December 3, 2020 issue

Ariel Dorfman

Songs of Loss and Reinvention

Learning from the knowledge migrants and exiles have accumulated across the centuries.

December 3, 2020 issue

Eduardo Halfon

Canción

In Guatemala City, the shadows of the past weigh heavily on the living.

November 9, 2020

Pardis Parker

Illegal Milk

There I was. With my grandfather and father. Three generations. Bandits all. Breaking the law.

November 4, 2020

Clair Wills

Learning to Grieve

A poet and a psychologist consider the necessity of mourning our dead.

November 19, 2020 issue

Andrew Delbanco

Rod Serling’s Night Terrors

The creator of ‘The Twilight Zone’ dramatized isolation and fear but still believed in the best of humanity.

November 19, 2020 issue

Nellie Hermann

Cancer Under Capitalism

In ‘The Undying,’ Anne Boyer rejects the conventions of the cancer memoir in favor of a manifesto.

November 5, 2020 issue

Marie-Antoinette; unfinished portrait by Alexander Kucharsky, 1791–1792

Lynn Hunt

Marie Antoinette: Why Was She So Hated?

How Marie Antoinette tried to save the monarchy.

November 5, 2020 issue

The latest releases from New York Review Books

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Blackballed

Darryl Pinckney

Divorcing

Susan Taubes

Writing Politics

edited by David Bromwich

J R

William Gaddis

Richard Howard Loves Henry James

Richard Howard

The Last Libertines

Benedetta Craveri

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