Literature

Essays

‘Thus I Lived with Words’

The modern reading public has resisted relinquishing its settled idea about Robert Louis Stevenson as a romantic fantasist, but in his day he was considered one of the best essayists of his generation.

April 4, 2024 issue

Robyn Creswell

Reimagining al-Andalus

To modern Arab thinkers, the Andalusian experiment has represented everything from the perils of factionalism to the benefits of cultural openness to the pain of exile.

February 22, 2024 issue

Brenda Wineapple

Stifled Rage

Louisa May Alcott worked obsessively to become a successful writer, which meant that despite her gift for tart observation she often retreated into homilies and platitudes.

April 18, 2024 issue

Nathaniel Rich

Writing Under Fire

In Politics and Literature at the Dawn of World War II, James Heffernan argues that for a full understanding of any historical period, we must read the literature written while its events were still unfolding.

December 21, 2023 issue

Johannes von Moltke

Embracing Anonymity

The critic and novelist Siegfried Kracauer returned repeatedly to anonymity as a theme in his work, and a new biography insists on his desire for anonymity in his life as well.

November 23, 2023 issue

Michael Hofmann

Bewitched by Goethe

In Johann Eckermann, Goethe found an amanuensis made in heaven.

May 25, 2023 issue

Daniel M. Lavery

The Old Man at Christmas

The humorist Jean Shepherd—whose writings inspired A Christmas Story—left a surprisingly deep impression on American culture.

December 19, 2023

Raven Leilani

Meaning It

Good sex writing embraces the moral difficulty of not knowing.

October 22, 2023

Essays

Kevin Lozano

Voice Lessons

There’s much to learn about independent media from the life and death of The Village Voice.

April 11, 2024

Frances Wilson

Kate’s Two Bodies

Central to the PR crisis over Kate Middleton’s cancer diagnosis is whether her body should be seen as mortal or immortal.

March 27, 2024

Ariel Dorfman

My Secret Police Files

Why did armed men come looking for me in Buenos Aires in 1974?

March 7, 2024

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

Essays by Tony Judt

Tony Judt

Captive Minds

Our contemporary faith in “the market” rigorously tracks its radical nineteenth-century doppelgänger—the unquestioning belief in necessity, progress, and History.

September 30, 2010 issue

Arnold Nursing Home, 7 Mile Road; photograph by Andrew Moore from Detroit Disassembled, just published by Damiani and the Akron Art Museum. For a slide show of Moore’s photographs, see the NYR blog, blogs.nybooks.com.

Tony Judt

Ill Fares the Land

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose.

April 29, 2010 issue

Tony Judt

The New Old Nationalism

Everywhere there has been a growing absorption in what Freud called the “narcissism of minor differences.” None of this began recently, born again as it were in 1989. Nationalism, in Isaiah Berlin’s words, is not “resurgent”—it never died.

May 26, 1994 issue

More by Tony Judt

Essays by Namwali Serpell

Ming Smith: Sun Ra Space II, New York City, 1978

Namwali Serpell

Sun Ra: ‘I’m Everything and Nothing’

The photographer Ming Smith’s pictures of Sun Ra from 1978 beautifully capture his energy.

July 23, 2020 issue

Elsa Triolet Library, Bobigny, France, 1996

Namwali Serpell

The Banality of Empathy

Narrative is an incredible vehicle for virtual experience—we think and feel with characters. It simulates empathy, so we believe it stimulates it. But if witnessing suffering firsthand doesn’t spark good deeds, why do we think art about suffering will?

March 2, 2019

Namwali Serpell

Glossing Africa

Whenever African writers are on a panel together, we are asked about the continent as a whole. When African writers get together on our own, we talk about glossaries.

August 21, 2017

Namwali Serpell

‘Such Womanly Touches’

Is there such a thing as a female style?

November 2, 2023 issue

Suzy Hansen

Twenty Years of Outsourced War

In Uncertain Ground, Phil Klay sets out to determine what twenty-first-century US foreign policy has done to the cocksure American mind.

October 19, 2023 issue

Jacqueline Rose

The Analyst

Stuart Hall was passionately committed to understanding how social formations affected the deepest parts of the mind.

September 21, 2023 issue

Namwali Serpell

Morrison Hall

A recent exhibit of Toni Morrison’s papers raised the question: How do you mourn a monument?

August 18, 2023

Fara Dabhoiwala

Life Is Short. Indexes Are Necessary.

In his new history of the index, Dennis Duncan traces its evolution through the constantly changing character of reading itself.

June 22, 2023 issue

Yasmine El Rashidi

A Life of Sheer Will

The Lebanese writer and painter Etel Adnan’s urgent need to see and document and create in every form earned her a cultlike status around the world.

June 8, 2023 issue

Kevin Lozano

The Oracle of Public Radio

In Michael Silverblatt’s long-running KCRW show, Bookworm, conversations with writers go past the imperatives of publicity.

May 6, 2023

Alejandro Chacoff

The Unbearable Weight of Levity

In Clarice Lispector’s newspaper columns and crônicas, she seems sensorially overcharged by the quotidian, needing only the tiniest slice of existence to feed her writing.

April 6, 2023 issue