Literature

Biography & Memoir

The Passion of Martha Graham

In a new biography, Deborah Jowitt meticulously describes Graham’s pioneering dances, but brushes lightly over Graham’s fervid, turbulent personal relationships, and the importance she ascribed to passion and sexual pleasure.

May 9, 2024 issue

Daphne Merkin

The Way She Was

“I never thought I was great,” Barbra Streisand writes in her capacious memoir, but the truth seems to be that for a large part of her life she has flirted with the possibility that she was.

April 4, 2024 issue

Andrew Delbanco

A Hell of a Performance

Norman Mailer wrote with an unstable mixture of self-indulgence and self-awareness, bravado and diffidence, glibness and bracing honesty, macho posturing and an almost sheepish gentleness.

April 18, 2024 issue

Jerome Groopman

Seeing the Power in Blindness

A writer narrating his increasing loss of vision asks fundamental questions about sight and cognition.

April 18, 2024 issue

David A. Bell

Piety & Power

A lively biography of Marie de Vignerot, the niece, confidante, and heiress of Cardinal Richelieu, sheds light on the religious passions and political intrigues of seventeenth-century France.

April 4, 2024 issue

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

Sasha Frere-Jones

Intentionality

I remember wanting to be in a band when I was nine.

October 8, 2023

Jessica Riskin

Every Creeping Thing

In his late writings and correspondence, Charles Darwin was thinking about how mortal beings strive to make what they can of themselves.

March 21, 2024 issue

Milan Kundera (1929–2023)

Milan Kundera

The Czech Wager

January 22, 1981 issue

Milan Kundera

The Tragedy of Central Europe

April 26, 1984 issue

Milan Kundera

The Novel and Europe

July 19, 1984 issue

Milan Kundera

‘Man Thinks, God Laughs’

June 13, 1985 issue

Milan Kundera

The Umbrella, the Night World, and the Lonely Moon

December 19, 1991 issue

Milan Kundera

You’re Not in Your Own House Here, My Dear Fellow

September 21, 1995 issue

The Latest

Jonathan Freedland

A Feigned Reluctance

Rory Stewart, in his recent memoir, observes with detachment what is ludicrous in politics—even when he’s near the center of it.

December 5, 2024 issue

John Banville

Enigmatic Roger Casement

Roger Casement became internationally celebrated for exposing the horrors of colonialism, yet he remains an elusive figure.

December 5, 2024 issue

Anne Enright

Alice Munro’s Retreat

In the years after she chose to stay with her husband despite learning that he had abused her daughter Andrea, Alice Munro’s stories came to reveal more than she might have known.

December 5, 2024 issue

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Friend of the Family

Jean Strouse’s Family Romance explores the relationship between the Anglo-Jewish Wertheimers and John Singer Sargent, who painted twelve portraits of them.

November 21, 2024 issue

Langdon Hammer

‘The Kingdom of Ends’

Though he began writing near the end of the twentieth century, the poet Reginald Shepherd remained an unapologetic modernist who believed firmly in the autonomy of art.

November 21, 2024 issue

Tim Parks

Hawthorne’s Mood Swings

Just as he was given to periods of melancholy and cheer, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories offer a constant back-and-forth between light and dark, town and wilderness, loneliness and society.

November 21, 2024 issue

Christine Smallwood

As I Lay Dying

Across thousands of pages, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Morning Star series presents a relentless excess of its characters’ inner lives; at its best, it poses troubling questions about the scope of human knowledge.

November 7, 2024 issue

Clare Bucknell

The Fact Man

At the heart of Daniel Defoe’s fictional world is a feeling for change, of the mutability and shiftiness of modern life and the people who thrive in it.

October 17, 2024 issue

David S. Reynolds

Grant vs. the Klan

New books reconsider how Ulysses S. Grant became a forceful defender of the rights of African Americans after the Civil War.

October 17, 2024 issue

Julia Kornberg

The Basement Tapes

At the end of his life, Reinaldo Arenas dictated his posthumously published memoir into a recorder. The newly unearthed tapes reveal a writer working beyond his mythology.

September 21, 2024