New Books

René Girard’s one-liners: Nietzsche was “so wrong that in some ways he’s right”; Sartre was “too even-keeled to become a true genius”... more »

More people than ever are sending photos of themselves naked. The pleasures and perils of the nude selfie... more »

Borges, Le Guin, Daniel Keyes — the best philosophical fiction prickles your conscience and knocks your moral sense askew  ... more »

Pankaj Mishra styles himself an outsider against an irredeemable establishment. But increasingly he finds himself in the mainstream... more »

When the moment calls for buffoonery and slapstick, ribald invective, and comedy that turns on bodily functions, enter Aristophanes... more »

A Romantic-era notion holds that science kills wonder. The work of Alan Lightman only multiplies it... more »

Alan Greenspan wished he’d never spoken of “irrational exuberance”; Thomas Kuhn rued introducing “paradigm shift” — coiner’s remorse is real ... more »

A mammoth new biography of Philip Roth is imminent. Who better to review it than, well, Philip Roth?  ... more »

The legacy of British imperialism is everywhere: Even the word “loot” is appropriated — from the Hindi “lut,” the spoils of war... more »

When it comes to Patricia Highsmith, the question of mental illness, of course, arises. Her personality was interwoven with those of her characters  ... more »

Joan Didion's potency and influence stems for her ability to repurpose an ingrained sense of futility into a tool of critical analysis... more »

To separate science from pseudoscience, it helps to consider the rationales of UFOlogists, Yeti enthusiasts, and yes, anti-vaxxers  ... more »

After residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell, along with a Guggenheim and a MacArthur, Bette Howland never wrote another book  ... more »

Golden age of the cigarette. The war over smoking is too easily cast as one of heroes and villains - in truth things were much messier  ... more »

Acid humor, a flair for pith, a feel for the uncanny — Joan Didion’s talents have been celebrated for decades. Let’s not stop now... more »

"Yeats saw so deeply into the contours of his age that the shape of the future became somewhat discernible"   ... more »

Was the painter Francis Bacon a truth-teller about humanity's animal nature, or a mere mimic, best at rendering feet, doorknobs, and toiletware?  ... more »

Both Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath were caught in the web of literary fame. But he lived to 74, she died at 30. The difference is instructive  ... more »

As a 23-year-old social-media influencer tops the best-seller list in France, the old guard fights back: “147 pages of emptiness, 19.50 lost euros” ... more »

In her writings, Mary Wollstonecraft flouted social norms. In life, she often defied her own pronouncements ... more »

Did E.E. Cummings’s relationship with a French prostitute really have a serious effect on his work?... more »

We inhabit a dystopian reality, says John Gray, which may account for the dearth of dystopian fiction... more »

Dostoevsky endured emphysema, hemorrhoids, and six epileptic fits a week. And yet, in his overheated and unventilated office, he persisted  ... more »

Mozart in Vienna. In 10 years he composed a half-dozen symphonies, 17 piano concertos, and several operas. It was as close to perfect as he ever came... more »

Being Francis Bacon. He lived with such intensity because death was a constant presence  ... more »

The postcapitalist theorist Mark Fisher worked at the periphery of journalism and academia, penning few books. And yet his influence is enormous   ... more »

Pirate publishers saturated the market and filled warehouses with unsellable stock. Result: the publishing crash of 1783... more »

Robert Gottlieb on Harold Bloom: "It is a tremendous pity that the final statement from a critic of such significance...should be this disjointed effort"   ... more »

What are dreams? A kind of theater of the unconscious? Random neural firings? A Darwinian adaptation?  ... more »

Young people rush to join the creative class of artists and academics. But beware the sacrifices that come with doing what you love   ... more »

Lucian Freud was violent, selfish, vindictive, lecherous. If he was not the devil, he was certainly the devil's advocate  ... more »

Wikipedia, comprising more than 55 million articles, is enormously popular. Is it "the last bastion of shared reality"?  ... more »

According to Schopenhauer, existence vacillates between suffering and boredom. In such a world, earthly happiness is impossible  ... more »

“Pampered lunatics often reach a great age,” it's been said. And so it was with Lucian Freud... more »

Dostoevsky in love. What's romance to a man who believed that suffering gives value to existence?... more »

Stop reading like a critic. It’s time we treat Beckett and de Beauvoir the same way we do Beyoncé and the Boss — with devotion  ... more »

More than the mother of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft was the mother of two flesh-and-blood daughters  ... more »

For George Saunders, fiction is fundamentally moral. Despite all that it can teach us, however, it is not our salvation ... more »

Anne Applebaum is deft at critiquing anyone to her left or right. She is far less willing to interrogate her own assumptions  ... more »

Essays & Opinions

Psychoanalysis and the novel. Authors and analysts are repositories of insight about our motives and behaviors   ... more »

Dear Abby, Dear Prudence, Ask Polly - we've reached Peak Advice. But are readers getting anything from all the edification?  ... more »

“The right advice to an ‘Unhappily Married Woman’ is not to tell her to imagine having sex with a different man, but as a different woman”  ... more »

Andy Owen went to war certain that he was advancing the cause of progress. He found a necessary rebuke in the work of John Gray... more »

In our time of plague, a cast of literary oracles has emerged: Camus, Defoe, Saramago. But in feeling trapped, Kafka is paramount... more »

In literary studies, melodrama reigns as paranoia is pitted against repair, violence against nurture, suspicion against trust   ... more »

Most anti-Semites hate Jews for what they imagine Jews to be. T.S. Eliot, by contrast, hated Jews for what they really are ... more »

"At 43 I constantly feel out of place with you. I have all the wrong thoughts and desires." A writer breaks up with his writing career... more »

Can you be traumatized by a secondhand experience? For historians of humankind’s darkest chapters, the answer appears to be “yes”... more »

Loving literature can be an entrée to the academic world. Such passion can also imprison you in academe’s broken system  ... more »

Every generation of artists has its problems with museums. Museums were once too corporate. Now they are “carceral and colonial, and thus ableist”   ... more »

Forget lords and ladies - the true history of the Middle Ages is found in legal accounts of peasants' crimes, conflicts, and inheritances  ... more »

Avoid oversimplification, question metaphors, stop talking in slogans — so urges a little book from the 1930s, a user’s manual for the mind... more »

Criticism is often a cycle of destruction, a matter of winners and losers. Tear down a peer's work to elevate your own  ... more »

In the 1950s, writers began to formulate a critique of technology. Since then we've rushed into an uncritical embrace. What now?... more »

A biography paints Tom Stoppard as unfailingly kind. The playwright’s reaction? He is “not as nice as people think”   ... more »

On pop futurism. The genre's method? Sketch out possible future, highlight emergent trend, and promise way for reader to benefit  ... more »

The ur-existentialist. Kierkegaard was torn by his desires for recognition and for walking the path of a self-denying Christian  ... more »

The provincialism of American literary culture: We want books that "speak to the moment," espousing a political urgency. That's small-minded  ... more »

A fact about the academic humanities? "Bomb-throwing radicals turn into humdrum humanists when they make the case for their departments"... more »

Transgression was the founding gesture of the avant-garde. Now the avant-garde can seem a little "rapey." What changed? ... more »

Philosophers have sought for centuries to understand beauty. Now scientists are giving it a try ... more »

Helen Frankenthaler was many things, but perhaps not “a Shakespeare of the Eisenhower era,” as a fulsome biography asserts... more »

Christopher Hitchens's widow and agent are trying to sink a biography in progress. Whose interests are they serving?  ... more »

"I am detail-oriented," "I am a team player" - cover letters require us to use language in horrific ways  ... more »

Geniuses are often obsessive, self-centered, and offensive. As Edmond de Goncourt put it: Almost no one loves a genius until he or she is dead... more »

Art of the zinger. In the delivery of a ringing - and withering - phrase, Clive James was without parallel  ... more »

Joan Didion was 70 before she finished a nonfiction book not drawn from magazine assignments. Her talent is spinning craftwork into art   ... more »

Critics hold that “the question of correctness is generally irrelevant” in poetry. But they’re mistaken about poets’ mistakes... more »

19th-century science supposedly elevated the disinterested mind over human vitality. But Alexander von Humboldt’s story challenges that narrative ... more »

Derrida and Foucault are often categorized by their critics as like-minded thinkers. In fact, they spent most of their lives disagreeing  ... more »

Conspiracy theories have always existed and always will. The problem isn’t with the theories, but with our susceptibility to them... more »

The American elite is now the first national ruling class - a good thing in some ways, bad in others. Michael Lind explains  ... more »

Plagued by anxiety attacks, Beckett turned to poetry, cardiology, psychoanalysis, and finally, obscure 17th-century Christian mysticism... more »

Adam Smith was at most a deist, and David Hume was an avowed skeptic. But religion influences the economic ideas they produced  ... more »

There’s an app for that! The notion that technology offers the best solution to any problem is appealing. And dangerous... more »

How should we read? For Will Self, “we would read as gourmands eat, gobbling down huge gobbets of text” ... more »

The paradox of political science: Only by remaining aloof from the messiness of politics can it achieve the scientific authority it craves  ... more »

“I have never written a plot-driven novel,” held Ursula Le Guin. “I don’t do it; never did it; don’t want to; can’t”  ... more »

The isolation artist. Edward Hopper's paintings make an emotional resurgence amid our sustained solitude  ... more »

When Catherine Camus was informed of the death of her son Albert, all she could say was, “Too young”  ... more »

Americans say they want 2.5 children, but they're having only 1.7, on average. Why? Ross Douthat's case for larger families... more »

Ferociously dull and laden with puffery, the academic book review is a tedious genre that's outlived its purpose ... more »

The genius of Schubert’s syphilitic years was to draw the listener into his melancholy world, all the while pointing to an unattainable beauty ... more »

René Girard was not a particularly great theorist. It's easy to spot his weaknesses and lacunae. But he is the theorist our era deserves... more »

The goal of all art is inexhaustible precision — something simple, like Melville’s whale, that gains endlessly in complexity... more »

Henri Breuil, “the Pope of Prehistory,” did more than anyone else to prove that our early ancestors were capable of symbolic thought... more »

"To find humor in death isn’t to degrade or deny the sanctity of human life, but rather to grapple with its finite nature"  ... more »

"If one were interested in the sexual life of the professoriate at the turn of the last century, it would be strange to omit Veblen" ... more »

The artist who most acutely registers the deranged quality of contemporary American public life? Peter Saul... more »