New Books

Jill Lepore has told a story of America — its sunny ideals and its darker realities. She rejected the urge to moralize but can't resist making stern judgments... more »

Bruce Lee's life was singular, abbreviated, and politically vacant. In the five decades since his death, he's become a multifarious symbol... more »

The battle over Kafka’s literary remains, fought by reasonable people with reasonable claims, never became a dark parable befitting the man himself... more »

Old age confers a certain freedom to say what one thinks. Donald Hall, who died this year, took full advantage... more »

Overconfident, often drunk, a foe to feminism, Norman Mailer is an odd fit for our time. As his work comes back into print, what does it mean for our culture?... more »

A publishing romance. James Laughlin was 6-foot-6, a handsome champion skier. Tennessee Williams was hunched over and wore dirty gray pants. The rest was history... more »

Nietzsche aimed to terrify rather than instruct. If his philosophy can be used as therapy, it’s through the ability to deliver an electric jolt to our souls... more »

Across nearly 50 books, Terry Eagleton has proven the adage that being usefully wrong is often better than being trivially right... more »

John Steinbeck was a bad husband. How bad? On his wedding night, he spent more than an hour on the phone with his mistress... more »

The aggression of Anthony Burgess. He skewered John le Carré, Stephen Hawking, and Umberto Eco. He even skewered himself... more »

Pretentious historicizing and sophistry on nearly every page. When Knausgaard writes about himself, it’s transcendent; when he writes about Hitler, it’s a train wreck... more »

Eleven-year-old Sally Horner was kidnapped in June 1948 and spent two years as the captive of an older man. Was this Nabokov's inspiration?... more »

A biographer’s plight: Philip Larkin was observant, romantic, and tender. He was also selfish, vulgar, and intolerant... more »

Every age offers its own cures for the previous generation’s supposedly poor parenting. The corrective du jour: Keep kids safe, but not too safe... more »

After the fall. What happened after jazz lost its cultural dominance, after it was sealed behind glass and rendered safe? It became more relevant... more »

Ancient Rome and Silicon Valley. In the former, a decline in power corresponded to a decline in ethics. In the latter, moral decline is accompanied by rising assets... more »

Hobbes, Hume, and Kant alike sympathetic to the thought that “there must be something more,” and sensitive to the limits of speculating about God... more »

The poet Laura Riding entered Robert Graves’s life in 1926. She claimed to be a goddess capable of stopping time; her true talent was for alienation... more »

A monument to candor. After 3,600 pages, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle comes to an end. “This novel has hurt everyone around me,” he writes... more »

Myers-Briggs is an "instrument" to discern personality types. It's also a mass-produced tool of social control. And a tool of liberation... more »

The old man and the muse. Adriana Ivancich, writer of rambling and incoherent letters, was banal beyond reason. Still, she sparked Hemingway’s creativity... more »

Chekhov, the ultimate commitment-phobe, married at 41. When his wife became pregnant, it seemed certain he wasn’t the father. Who was?... more »

Tourists came for the scenery, the theater, the beer and sausages, the attractive blonds. Until the late 1930s, Germany was seen as the ideal place to vacation ... more »

Robert Graves regarded tranquility as the enemy of poetry. His life was chaotic, but purposely so. "The poet, like the kettle, must boil to produce... more »

We all worry about privacy. But we also willingly give it up. What does it mean to worry so much about something we seem to want so little of?... more »

Claire Tomalin is known as a literary editor and biographer — Hardy, Austen, Dickens. Now she's telling her own story... more »

Architectural criticism has a rich tradition of antimodern alarm. James Stevens Curl is eager to join it. He wrote the critique of all critiques, or at least he tried... more »

The famously liberal philosopher John Rawls has been recast as a sharp critic of capitalism. If Rawls really was a socialist, why was he so reticent about it?... more »

Is your dream version of yourself a drily witty, slightly abrasive woman in a black turtleneck reading Sontag, Didion, and Arendt? This is the book for you... more »

Diversity of thought is the lifeblood of philosophy. Nothing is more exciting than a fresh idea. Yet academic philosophy in America shuns diversity... more »

The apocalyptic despair of the crisis-of-democracy crowd is bracing. Yes, this might be the beginning of the end. Or maybe it's the prelude to a new kind of politics... more »

Maryanne Wolf was worried. She wasn't reading as she used to. She conducted an experiment on herself, which confirmed that she'd lost "cognitive patience." Have you?... more »

Anne Hathaway’s rough ride. She's been exploited and slandered in the dim hope that her shadowy life will tell us something essential about her husband, Shakespeare. It doesn't... more »

Weegee specialized in photographing crime scenes. Murder was his business, he said. Art critics loved his style. Then he slipped into obscurity... more »

In 1837, Darwin sketched a tree of life: a common ancestor at the trunk, ever-dividing branches leading to new species. Turns out those branches aren't as separate as we thought... more »

More than 800 pre-Gutenberg editions of The Divine Comedy are known to exist. The history of translations and interpretations is long and fractious... more »

The architecture critic Owen Hatherley has announced his last “walking around and looking at things” book. We look forward to his stopping... more »

Pentecostal churches were hellfire preaching, general pandemonium — and music. They were where Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and James Brown learned to move a crowd... more »

How would Aristotle cater a luncheon? What would he say about résumés or global warming? Such tidbits, among other fluff, make up a new book... more »

Essays & Opinions

Requiem for the Gutenberg mind. The cognitive virtues of reading on paper have developed over centuries. But now the practice is in its last gasp... more »

Books just keep getting longer. We conflate physical heft with artistic or intellectual merit. Thus our new golden age of the doorstop... more »

As a genre, horror has been with us since cave paintings. Why? It speaks to the darkness that haunts the human condition... more »

For Elizabeth Bishop, solitude was bliss. It meant comfort, adventure, and jaunts around “the islands of the Imagination”... more »

The death of the celebrity profile. It’s been supplanted by Instagram and the first-person essays of the famous. The loss to public culture is real... more »

Remembering the Village Voice. Drugs were delivered to the office, writers stabbed one another in the back, headlocks were occasionally employed... more »

An accursed genre of personal essay has now emerged: “My Year of Being Held Responsible for My Own Behavior”... more »

Maeve Brennan had lost it. She was sleeping next to a bathroom at The New Yorker and was giving away her money. All William Shawn would say was, “She’s a beautiful writer”... more »

When we are young, we are taught that art comes from lofty places — the pursuit of truth, beauty, sublimity. Nonsense. It comes from antipathy, insecurity, jealousy... more »

Literary biography is a strange addiction. Reading a life is like reading a poem — full of ambiguity. This is rarely truer than in the case of Pablo Neruda... more »

“Please be kind to Muriel.” A love affair gone wrong, intimate letters leaked — blackmail and betrayal hovered over both Muriel Spark’s fiction and her life... more »

The number of scientists is growing at a faster rate than the human population. Why haven't more scientists produced more discoveries?... more »

The aphorism is rhetorical algebra, an elevated and ambitious format. Too bad the genre’s current state is one of disgrace... more »

1968 and the fate of radical protest. The counterculture evaporated into New Age bromides and identity politics. But the core of resistance never entirely disappeared... more »

Higher education has historically been a bulwark against authoritarianism — or its pawn. What will it be this time?... more »

Piero Manzoni’s 1961 work, “Artist’s Shit,” featured 90 small, sealed tins. After they exploded in market value, poor autoclaving produced some literal explosions... more »

Self-help and the apostles of positivity. Why do we demand the most conspicuous happiness from people with the greatest reason to be unhappy?... more »

Modernism and the middle class once ruled the art world. No longer. The firewall between art and money has been abandoned... more »

Immortality can sound appealing, but what would it really entail? Tedium and banality — like being trapped in a never-ending cocktail party ... more »

“Art, it seems to me, should simplify.” So explained Willa Cather, who, through uncompromising effort, wrote the Great American Novel... more »

When genuine criticism is undertaken at the risk of ostracism, marginalization, retribution — this is where abuses like Avital Ronell’s grow like moss, or mold... more »

The Nietzsche wars have raged for more than a century. When a sunny, happier, and more literary Nietzsche threatened to take hold, the bad Nietzsche was never far behind... more »

Romanticism vs. romance novels. For Wordsworth, the genre was “sickly and stupid”; for Coleridge, it merited reading only in indolence... more »

Writing and reading online is an exercise in willful misunderstanding, impatience, and hostility. The result? The op-edization of everything... more »

As politics has become an exercise in drawing a bright line between those on the right and those in the wrong, Meghan Daum falls back in love with an old flame: nuance... more »

For some, socialism conjures the Soviet Union and the gulag; for others, Scandinavia and guaranteed income. What do we mean, in 2018, when we talk about socialism?... more »

For a rare group — Witold Gombrowicz, Anaïs Nin, perhaps Franz Kafka, especially John Cheever private diaries comprise their finest writing... more »

“A writer,” said V.S. Naipaul, “is in the end not his books, but his myth.” Now that he has died, what is the myth of Naipaul?... more »

The best spy and detective fiction, we're told, transcends its genre. That’s a backhanded compliment, of course, but what does it even mean?... more »

Derided as boring, indecisive, and weak, gray is overlooked and undersung. In fact, it’s full of possibility, the color that makes all the others speak... more »

Scholars may not agree on how to measure social class, or even if it exists. But that’s no reason to stop talking about it. Kwame Anthony Appiah explains... more »

Hemingway described Little Women as full of “sweetness and light.” Other critics characterize the book as treacly. True enough, in some ways. But it's also an angry book... more »

Given our collective mania for attention, and the boundless opportunities we now have to seek it, we might ask: What did people believe they lost when they lost their privacy?... more »

For all his renown, Hume remains a philosopher’s philosopher. Why? He's not a tragic or romantic figure, and did not offer an easily distilled message... more »

"A curious situation has arisen." That's how Leonard Bernstein began an unusual pre-concert address to an audience. He went on to disavow the performance he was about to conduct... more »

Kant believed that beautiful art “must always show a certain dignity in itself.” Alfred Brendel disagrees. He believes in musical jokes ... more »

“Relevant” is one of the great nonsense words in art, says Jay Nordlinger. The best art doesn't speak to our time. It speaks for all time... more »

Among the Leonardo loonies. How a strange subculture of da Vinci obsessives creates elaborate, unsubstantiated theories to explain him... more »

Choosing what to read takes time and effort and often results in disappointment. Do yourself a favor: Ditch the best-seller list. Read old books instead... more »

"Anyone ambitious who lives to be old or even old endures the inevitable loss of ambition’s fulfillment." Donald Hall on life at 90... more »

We've become indifferent to memory, allergic to tradition. Truth has been eclipsed by useful knowledge. Technocracy reigns, humanism wanes. Deep thoughts with Ross Douthat... more »

The life of the mind has been overtaken by the imperatives of advertising. Welcome to the era of the promotional intellectual ... more »

Anger and tenderness. Adrienne Rich wrote little while raising her three sons, but the experience changed her: “Motherhood radicalized me”... more »

Happy endings are rare in literary fiction. Instead we get bleak plots and pervasive pessimism. Can we really say literature is good for us?... more »

Reading Lolita in the age of #MeToo. The book never pardons us for the sin of participating in it. The revulsion is why it endures. Caitlin Flanagan explains... more »

Learning French has been likened to joining a gang. Both involve "a long and intensive period of hazing.” Why bother? It forces you to rethink your approach to language itself... more »

We used to reach for metaphors, idioms, and images to convey abstract ideas, says Steven Pinker. Now our prose is more efficient, but more lifeless... more »

The cult of Evelyn Waugh included Graham Greene and Kingsley Amis. The modern Waughian wears tweed, rides a bike, and, most likely, blogs... more »

Russia came early to the idea that "the people" carry the moral solution to the world’s ills. These populists, fueled by a guilty idealism, failed utterly... more »

Peter Berger did as much as anyone to illuminate the place of religion in the modern world. He was more opaque about his own religious identity... more »