New Books

The phrase "fiercely private" is often applied to artists who secretly love the attention. Anita Brookner wasn’t one of them... more »

In place of Middlemarch and Montaigne, we have Mr. Beast. The post-literacy thesis sounds compelling, until you begin to unpack it... more »

For Chekhov, doomsaying was an ingeniously disguised form of sloth — and modern disenchantment an epidemic worth curing... more »

“Reading is like exercise. You have to go a little bit beyond what you’re comfortable with, a little bit more than you can really do”... more »

Critical theory can be used to convey sophistication — but when it goes wrong, the whiff of pretension and arrogance is unmistakable... more »

The split between Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye led to no shortage of bad blood. But were their theories of literary inheritance that far apart?... more »

Why collect stamps? Explanations include nostalgia, anal-retentiveness, erotic frustration, and the desire to escape into a remote, private world... more »

Stephen Hawking, brilliant and extraordinary, was spoken of with reverence and affection. Those who knew him have a dimmer view... more »

Prophets of literary doom keep writing books about the death of reading. The genre refutes the thesis ... more »

Would an influential jeremiad against American literature’s devotion to emotional immaturity change writerly habits? Alas, no... more »

“In Silicon Valley, science fiction is neither a slight nor an incidental entertainment,” says Jill Lepore. “Instead it’s taken as a form of technical writing, a set of assembly instructions”... more »

At 83, Terry Eagleton is fixated on death, which he unnervingly describes as “the erotic bliss of yielding to an impregnable power"... more »

Helen Vendler spent a lifetime writing about lyric poetry, yet her criticism always started from frustration, not certainty... more »

Literature without lust? For Leslie Fiedler, the American canon comprised adventure books, sea tales, and other prepubescent diet fare... more »

During the golden age of Oxbridge dons, intellectual elites were treated as a national treasure. Then came Margaret Thatcher... more »

Rachel Cusk’s new novel was billed as “literary scandal of the year.” Strip away the controversy and it’s instantly forgettable... more »

Sumerian tablets, Soviet cybernetics, Google server banks — human history can be seen via our ever more elaborate data apparatuses ... more »

A wine so thick you could write with it. Pâté made from cat meat. What did boys obsess over in the Renaissance? Food... more »

Soviet censors mangled Vasily Grossman's wartime journalism. The original copy reveals a palimpsest of what propaganda demanded... more »

Modern diet and food-fad notions obscure a basic truth: For most of human existence, we have lived in the shadow of starvation... more »

Even as a young man, Franz Rosenzweig was suspicious: "You believe you are philosophizing, but you are only writing your own biography”... more »

Yes, its titans were bad writers, narcissists, failed artists, murderers, and Nazis — and yet, it’s okay to love literary theory... more »

Before puritanism and personality cults made it boring, affect theory brimmed with real intellectual potential. Laura Kipnis explains... more »

What should we do with “truly depraved,” morally dangerous art? Consider the “worst” of this lot and few easy answers emerge... more »

Admired in his time by Dickens, Byron, and Mary Shelley, Washington Irving’s reputation has been in steep decline ever since... more »

History is the story of corrupt elites and the virtuous activists who oppose them. Or so it was, formulaically, for Howard Zinn... more »

Few American writers have skewered the self-deluding barbarity that is American foreign policy with as much force as Dwight Macdonald... more »

W.G. Sebald’s poetic, picturesque accounts of Austrian literature are, at crucial points, gravely distorted... more »

The “.” emerged 2,000 years ago. “?” in the 8th century, “!” in the 14th. Then not much changed since about 1600... more »

Despite the praise it received from T.S. Eliot, Auden’s early poetry, while striking, was neither good nor particularly coherent... more »

After a minor renaissance in the late 20th century, narrative poetry is being eclipsed by lyric poetry. That’s a shame... more »

For John Berger, the dead and the living were interdependent — and the stronger the link, the happier and healthier the society... more »

How did Heidegger, married and 35, explain his affair with 18-year old Hannah Arendt? “The demonic has seized me”... more »

In 1914, scholars classified every known instrument by sound. One missing category has now been filled: instruments that don't exist... more »

What characterized the late-80s culture wars wasn't ideology alone, but a landscape where art itself still mattered. Paul Elie explains... more »

The secret history of silence stretches from Pythagoras, who required years of quiet from his pupils, to the Anti-Noise League’s nearly silent lavatories... more »

Freudianism died in 1963, killed by Karl Popper. Yet in every generation there arises an attempt at rehabilitation. Meet Mark Solms... more »

Paul Celan met Martin Heidegger three times, an improbable pairing of Holocaust survivor and Nazi sympathizer... more »

With age, Auden's brilliance on the page grew ever more estranged from his unwashed, drug-and-drink-addled private existence... more »

Essays & Opinions

Harold Cruse was as pure an autodidact as any 20th-century university scholar. Tuskegee wouldn't hire him. Michigan gave him tenure... more »

In his diary, the Italian litterateur Cesare Pavese boasted: “I am king. In the course of ten years, I have done it all.” Then he set to arranging his death... more »

Glenn Gould was fabulously neurotic, opinionated, and flamboyant. Seventy years on, his Bach still sets the standard... more »

Annie Dillard “was a sort of drill sergeant of human consciousness: determined, always, to force herself, and others, to see”... more »

“The body could have been that of a hobo.” The life — and death — of Victor Serge is evidence that years spent on the barricades take a toll... more »

How a young Roger Scruton, an apolitical and unusually charming Cambridge undergraduate, became Britain's most reviled intellectual... more »

“The precarity of art in the 21st century has led Gen Z to forsake subcultural credibility for an instrumentalized careerism”... more »

To teach students how to think, shut down the Wi-Fi, scramble the cell signal, and send them to weeklong retreats in the deep, dark woods... more »

Dwight Macdonald was famous for writing with a sneer. His criticism now reads less like erudition than compulsive, gleeful bullying... more »

Nature rightly insists that we must learn from the tragedy of Jason Arday. Unfortunately the journal has learned the wrong lessons... more »

In the winter of 1988, Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay while visiting his in-laws in Las Vegas. He's been fending off critics ever since... more »

Time speeds up and slows down; days blend together to the point of indistinguishability — time disorientation is real... more »

The extraordinary achievement of Moby-Dick is to unroll the blank sheet on which modernity will write itself... more »

Once again this year, Vinita Prabhakar assigned her college students a short story she'd taught for a decade. This time, she lost her job... more »

The political right often acts in bad faith in its attacks on academia; in response, academics lapse into tendentious moralism... more »

Americans are indifferent to art but obsess over art heists. "It’s as though a nation of teetotalers chooses, year after year, to hang out in bars... more »

Broke and in search of a sinecure, Edgar Allan Poe went to Washington in 1843 to try to meet the president’s son. A fiasco ensued... more »

In 1970, 1 in 13 four-year degrees was in English. Today it's 1 in 60. What happened? “Canon" became a dirty word... more »

Siegfried Kracauer believed films could foretell political disaster. What does his approach make of today’s cinema?... more »

No one was more baffled by his celebrity than Albert Einstein himself: "Why is it that nobody understands me and everybody likes me?"... more »

Before Godot, Beckett wrote a study of Proust and the redemptive force of art. He spent the next few decades abandoning that faith... more »

Frank O'Hara packed 100 references into 500 lines. Even his most devoted readers miss most of them... more »

What is intelligence? A vice president at Google aims to find out, ignoring decades of lessons from cognitive science and linguistics... more »

Leszek Kolakowski, canonized in Poland, remains a stranger in Oxford, Berkeley, and Montreal, the places that sheltered him... more »

Who is the greatest short story writer of all time? According to one data cruncher, it’s not Chekhov or Barthelme, but Joyce Carol Oates... more »

Paul Celan's childhood spanned seven languages and one vanishing world. His poetry created space to mourn and remember and survive ... more »

"The thought that Socrates would care about how his icon is fashioned seems strange to me, but the thought that Plato would care is not strange"... more »

In weird-girl literature, detached protagonists have bad jobs, slightly happier best friends, and troubled relationships. Are the novels any good?... more »

The smorgasbord: What began as modest, rule-bound dining in Sweden evolved into something akin to a “pagan feast” in the United States... more »

What does Emily Wilson make of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey? It’s an “audiovisual spectacle” with little to no “narrative and emotional depth”... more »

“My wonderful horseykins,” “my little sperm whale.” If Chekhov’s love life was epistolary, what are we to make of his fondness for brothels?... more »

There's a name for demanding a group publicly recite a political position as the price of belonging: illiberalism... more »

What if feelings aren’t peripheral to rational thought and are, instead, part of the machinery that makes rational thought possible?... more »

For decades, Anglophilia steadily fed the imaginations of “respectable” American conservatives. No longer... more »

AI poses a moral hazard, but it may also render unintelligible cultural concepts like merit, authenticity, expertise, and deliberation... more »

An enfeebled grip, a depressingly slow gait, and the pitying kindness of others — Theodore Dalrymple searches for the consolations of age... more »

"Whatever potential hazards and unintended consequences flow from AI’s mass adoption, my own experience using it contradicted much of what I was being told"... more »

Sexual Personae was a scandal, and a ticket to infamy for its author, Camille Paglia. Its 700 pages remain incendiary — and exhausting... more »

What connects the writer Ottessa Moshfegh, a fired professor in Florida, and a prudish college president? A creeping puritanism... more »

"Sonny Rollins was the last feral master of an art that has become at least partly domesticated"... more »

Patrick O'Brian invented his Irish childhood, his years at sea, his very name. His readers forgave him ... more »

What's with the boom in biographies of people who never existed? The strange rise of a new literary genre... more »

Acupuncture meridians, Ayurvedic nadis, Egyptian metu. Every tradition imagined hidden channels. Has modern science finally found them?... more »

No wave of riveting AI writing has arrived — only the diminution of the magic and excitement of human writing.... more »

“I’m not a provocateur,” insists Alex Byrne, the MIT philosopher who decided to grab hold of a third rail: youth gender medicine... more »

No, we are not post-literate. The reading panic is merely the result of histrionic op-eds that misdiagnose the erosion of literary culture... more »

"Anonymity is what the aesthete fears above all," says Mark Lilla. One task of poetry is to assert the individual against the masses... more »

At its American debut, half the audience walked out of Waiting for Godot. Now the whole world waits with it... more »

For Marco Roth, the cardinal sin of elegy writing “is to make it about oneself more than the deceased”... more »

Vienna's coffeehouses bred inward-looking modernists. Belgrade's kafanas bred regicide and revolution ... more »