New Books

Monotheism has been called "the single most significant innovation in history." And yet no one can quite define it... more »

“Anguish,” “agony,” “ache,” “affliction” — why are there so many words for pain? Darcey Steinke unpacks the meaning of suffering... more »

In the trenches of World War I, a German Jew named Franz Rosenzweig began to create an audacious philosophical system... more »

An Emerson for our times? Terry Tempest Williams’s “epic documentation of the Glorians” is full of celestial beings and desert miracles... more »

Shut out of plum positions because of his political sins, Malcolm Cowley became a triple-threat hired gun: reporting, reviewing, editing... more »

College students’ sense of meaning and purpose is transactional and internet-based. For them, the campus is a hustler’s paradise... more »

A cow carcass, buckets of blood, poisoned dogs: A lot of death went into the making of Chaim Soutine’s art... more »

Despite science's efforts, consciousness isn't quantifiable. The hard problem remains stubbornly hard, but reading poetry may help... more »

There were two Thomas Manns: the early, coolly ironic author of Death in Venice — and the later, literary spokesman for democracy... more »

Laid off from The Washington Post, the critic Ron Charles turns to books that ask a fundamental question: Do I matter?... more »

Minimally competent fathers are lavished with unearned admiration. The concept deserves a name: oppressive praise... more »

Was Elizabeth Bathory, aka “the Blood Countess,” a torturer of young maidens or a victim of a disinformation campaign?... more »

"It’s weird: in Updike’s teenage letters he sounds preternaturally sophisticated; in his forties, he sounds like a horny kid"... more »

For leftists, philanthropy is often simply an expression of plutocratic power. How then to make sense of the surprisingly radical Garland Fund?... more »

Trotsky in Mexico. How Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and a Kremlin-hatched plot led to an ice axe in the head... more »

Often invoked, rarely read, the work of the philosopher Alexandre Kojève is finally landing in the spotlight... more »

The film critic A.S. Hamrah has no use for plot description, boosterism, or takedowns. He focuses, instead, on continuities and contradictions... more »

In the Victorian era, discoveries upended humanity's place in the cosmos. Tennyson turned this metaphysical crisis into poetry... more »

“Being a literary sex symbol can really take it out of you, making it tougher to maintain your lofty dignity as a quoter of Kafka”... more »

“Revolution” initially signaled destruction. Why did the word take on a more optimistic tenor?... more »

“Good politics, like good art, does not lecture or declaim. It strains; it argues; it is an unending negotiation with the difficult and intransigent adventure of humanity”... more »

Peter Matthiessen went to Paris to spy and write the Great American Novel. But he was, in his words, “always in the club drinking martinis”... more »

Walking “a fine line between principled opposition and crankdom,” the film critic A.S. Hamrah rails against Rotten Tomatoes, texting at the movies, and digital projection... more »

How did Western psychiatric taxonomies handle such non-Western disorders as “pibloktoq” (a wintertime psychosis) and “kufungisisa” (thinking too much)?... more »

Larry Levis died in 1996, at the age of 49. His posthumously published poetry forms a towering body of work... more »

When Michelangelo met Titian. The evidence of how they influenced each other is scant, and we so enter the realm of the educated guess... more »

Malcolm Cowley’s Stalinism reveals him to have been a fool and a knave. What does it say about his literary acumen? ... more »

The novelist George Sand dressed like a man, took a male name, and went through lovers like a rake. The life and the work cannot be disentangled... more »

With its mania for taxonomy and penchant for tidy solutions, psychiatry is ripe for reinvention. A new book takes a swing — and misses... more »

Why do so many authors and critics remain attached to “literary fiction” in our commercialized landscape of books?... more »

Leonardo Sciascia, Sicilian public intellectual, never got over seeing a mafioso tell an indebted shopkeeper that his daughter “seems almost alive”... more »

Championing “Attensity!”, the attention liberation movement is here promoting a digital detox. Does it offer anything new?... more »

Margaret Atwood on Margaret Atwood. "This is a very long book that is very ample on seemingly insignificant matters and oddly reticent on a few big ones"... more »

Russia’s forests "have been an obstacle and a sanctuary. They have also been both an object of reverence and fodder for exploitation"... more »

Margaret C. Anderson, editor of The Little Review, was forced to choose between her magazine and her house. She moved into a tent... more »

The epistolary Updike was open, amiable, self-assured, wonderfully lucid, and brilliantly organized. He was also emotionally impenetrable... more »

Sleep is subjective and lonely. What if it turns out we’re not alone in the bad dreams that plague us?... more »

"Some gentlemen are dandies, but most dandies are not gentlemen." What unites the superior air, exaggerated sense of style, and sartorial splendor?... more »

How Bennett Cerf — "part Gatsby, part glad-handing salesman and part starstruck fanboy" — built a publishing powerhouse, then sold it away... more »

Essays & Opinions

Elaine Scarry says pain unmakes language. Jan Steyn, begs to differ — or at least keeps translating and typing... more »

The dictionary, initially a monument to language fixed in amber, is less a fortress than a weather vane... more »

Shulamith Firestone’s fundamental battle is with the grip of normalcy and conformity on every human life... more »

He championed Joyce, mentored Eliot, and broadcast fascist propaganda. Ezra Pound was indispensable as an artist and irredeemable as a man... more »

Adam Phillips: "Psychoanalysis is not better than aromatherapy or worse than neurology, it’s simply something for people who find it intriguing"... more »

Harold Bloom made academics wince and general readers swoon. The asymmetry was the point... more »

In 2022, the college essay was declared dead. More than three years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, the college essay lives on... more »

“How we live as ethical people and behave and think wisely is not something to optimize, or, crucially, to even let ourselves think about in this way”... more »

Werner Herzog has spent 50 years insisting that lies reveal deeper truths. That argument has become harder to make... more »

Hoping to catch a glimpse of the legendarily fat G.K. Chesterton, William James climbed a ladder to peer into his garden — to no avail... more »

We are wealthier than Aristotle could have imagined, yet we spend little of that wealth on what he believed it was for: leisure... more »

How come a person who can’t focus on a novel can sit through a three-hour video? The problem isn't the screen. It's the environment... more »

If you memorize the classic fallacies — ad hominem, post hoc, straw man — you inoculate yourself against them. That’s a nice, but false, idea... more »

"What is it to live near to light, in sustained awareness of it? How does it braid itself into our sense of revelation, our communion with grace?... more »

Staunch anti-Nazis, the members of Berlin’s Fest family were penalized first for their politics, and then as defeated Germans... more »

David Brooks on the sins of the educated class, what Trump gets right, and why Brooks is leaving The New York Times for Yale University... more »

“Most people who subscribe to scientific materialism take it to be so obviously correct that it could not be denied by any rational person who truly understood it”... more »

"I find myself being more and more difficult," Toni Morrison once said. "It's something I really relish." The difficulty was the point... more »

What happens when a novel’s plot comes uncannily close to major breaking news? The case of Murder Bimbo is instructive... more »

“One of the most consequential misunderstandings in the history of literary criticism turns on a single Greek word”... more »

We associate confessional poetry with Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. Larry Levis’s confessionalism was different... more »

In publications like New Masses and The Anvil, the proletarian literary movement had a message for Ezra Pound: “See you in hell”... more »

It should be as good to remember a past joy as to anticipate a future one, reasoned Derek Parfit. Nonsense, argues Samuel Scheffler... more »

Oscar Wilde, William Morris, and John Ruskin were exemplars of socialist aesthetics, advancing the view that more leisure would result in better art... more »

How did a stereopticon lecturer and his white-supremacist son end up in novels by Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald?... more »

“If you were to construct a baseball lineup of the western world’s foundational thinkers, Plato would almost certainly bat cleanup”... more »

Great Books programs have an unsavory reputation on the political left. That’s a mistake... more »

That books are disappearing, along with our capacity for complex and rational thought, has become a ubiquitous belief. Doesn't mean it's true... more »

"You don’t need a penis to read Infinite Jest, but you might need a dictionary." David Foster Wallace's divisive novel turns 30... more »

Raritan was a small magazine full of muscular writing. Why did it fail to cultivate a younger audience?... more »

Is there a way to engage in biographical criticism without becoming a moralizing bore? Consider the case of Philip Roth... more »

Children’s literature, full of animal protagonists, is not about how animals act or think. It is about people dressed up as animals... more »

Harold Bloom, James Wood, Jack Edwards. At just 27, Edwards, a YouTube and TikTok star, has become the most important literary critic in the world... more »

The unheralded Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose sent a letter to Einstein in 1924. It would alter the direction of quantum mechanics... more »

The war between writers and editors can be long, brutish, and nasty. "Every semicolon was a matter of life or death”... more »

With subfields dominated by lefty-activists and new centers for conservatives, what is the state of academic viewpoint diversity?... more »

What was the first type of knowledge to exist on planet Earth? Colin McGinn on pain as a way of knowing... more »

We generally visualize time as a line stretching into the future. That’s a surprisingly modern notion... more »

Writers and their day jobs: William S. Burroughs was an exterminator, Joseph Heller a blacksmith. James Joyce worked in a movie theater... more »

John — sparsely toothed with mismatched old clothes — could most often be found at UCLA, burnishing his reputation as the last intellectual... more »

Famous for telling writers to embrace their “shitty first drafts,” Bird by Bird is one of the most popular writing guides of all time. Is it any good?... more »

“Telling someone to love literature because reading is good for society is like telling someone to believe in God because religion is good for society”... more »

“Authenticity is the supreme literary value, when in fact it is not an aesthetic value at all. Can there be a prescription more discouraging to the imagination?"... more »

In C.P. Snow's day, literary intellectuals were the cultural elite. Now the power dynamic has been reversed: STEM dominates the culture... more »

John le Carré’s work is being adapted everywhere — TV, museums, theater. Why hasn’t his relevance waned?... more »

The ratio of words written by Kafka to words written about Kafka is estimated to be about 1:10,000,000. Is there anything left to say?... more »

Oliver Sacks, romantic science, and the facticity of narrative. Lawrence Weschler explains a 35-year friendship... more »

Science fiction and prophecy. "Something like comfort is achieved when the absurdity of the real begins to look like the far-fetched What If of the imaginary"... more »

At 100, The New Yorker is venerable, storied, seemingly indestructible — and just one more "gilded gargoyle on the cathedral of polite thinking"... more »

Is a prohibition against gossip wise or feasible, or is it an affront to human nature? Consider the Bruderhof... more »