Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Biography & Memoir

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

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

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

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

Regina Marler

Carson McCullers: A Connoisseur of Yearning

July 23, 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

Regina Marler

Al & Georgia & Beck & Paul

Two recent books examine the lives of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe and their astonishingly productive marriage.

November 7, 2019 issue

Edward Snowden; illustration by Joanna Neborsky

Jonathan Lethem

Snowden in the Labyrinth

Edward Snowden’s ‘Permanent Record’

October 24, 2019 issue

The Latest

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

Maggie Doherty

Bella Abzug’s Fight for a Broader Feminism

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

November 5, 2020 issue

Tim Parks

Whatever It Takes

“Is Machiavelli good, then, or is he evil?” asks the French scholar Patrick Boucheron.

October 22, 2020 issue

The stones of Callanish, Isle of Lewis, Scotland, 2010

Hugh Raffles

The Stones of Lewis

A line of monoliths once stretched from this “Stonehenge of the North” to the large outcrop of Lewisian gneiss that I used to climb from my sister Franki’s house.

October 9, 2020

Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad, St. Petersburg, Russia, 2011

Yuri Slezkine

Speak, Memory?

October 22, 2020 issue

Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court shortly after being sworn in, Washington, D.C., August 1993

Pamela Karlan

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 1933–2020

The late justice not only wrote about the connection between sex equality and liberty; she lived it.

October 22, 2020 issue

Brenda Wineapple

Longfellow’s Gentle Phantoms

October 22, 2020 issue

Keith Thomas

Richard III: ‘Subtle, False and Treacherous’

October 22, 2020 issue

Merve Emre

The Meticulous One

Her novels cast a pitiless light on the relationship between patriarchy and fascism.

October 22, 2020 issue

The latest releases from New York Review Books

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Blackballed

Darryl Pinckney

Suppose a Sentence

Brian Dillon

Unwitting Street

Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

Medusa Beach

Melissa Monroe

The Man Without Talent

Yoshiharu Tsuge

Meet Monster

Ellen Blance and Ann Cook

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