New Books

What caused Nietzsche’s insanity? The usual theories — syphilis, seeing a horse being whipped — don’t hold up... more »

Automata of antiquity. Mythic Crete was the Silicon Valley of the ancient world, home of the cryptic maze, manned flight, self-guided arrows... more »

Tragedy and religion. Disease killed her son; her husband fell off a mountain. "No one escapes terrible loss," says Elaine Pagels... more »

Hermann Hesse was intent on alienating his parents. He smoked, read Turgenev with a revolver, and wrote bad poetry... more »

The Enlightenment definitively and rigidly shapes modern society. But the idea of all-encompassing rationality is a mirage... more »

The unlikely odyssey of Sergei Shchukin: How a Russian textile magnate became one of the most important patrons of the Parisian avant-garde... more »

The two Sylvia Plaths. How to reconcile her cheery letters — cooking, acquiring a hunky husband — with a disenchanting domestic life?... more »

The Beast of Beverly Hills. Architectural Digest made a fortune by placing a good bet: Americans would drool over celebrity, money, and power... more »

Life on the lecture circuit. Frederick Douglass’s moral crusade entailed exhausting rail journeys, hostile mobs, and time away from his dysfunctional family... more »

The many Karl Marxes: He is relentlessly reinterpreted, analyzed, medicalized, flattered, and diminished. Why can't we stop talking about him?... more »

Saul Bellow's youthful Trotskyism had, by the mid-‘60s, given way to liberalism. Then he wrote the first neoconservative novel, Mr. Sammler’s Planet... more »

The cloaked fiend. Vampires, seen philosophically, represent “black illumination” and “blasphemous life.” They are a dark, epistemic riddle... more »

The appeal of Stoic philosophy to both ancient Romans and today’s therapy-chasing Americans is unsurprising. But darkness is at the heart of Stoicism... more »

"By one estimate," says Carl Zimmer, "genealogy has now become the second-most-popular search topic on the internet. It is outranked only by porn"... more »

A character study of God. Literary criticism is a valuable way to understand religious texts. But do the same methods work for the Bible and Quran?... more »

For Jill Lepore, history is about how we know what we know (or think we do), and what to make of the gap between evidence and truth... more »

His mother was his muse. Philip Larkin wrote home with terrifying frequency but didn’t have much to say beyond the trivial... more »

Hauntings, haints, and wraiths of every stripe and disposition appear in today’s literary fiction. But what to make of literature’s spectral moment?... more »

Lionel Trilling did not care to be a critic or to be thought of as one. He always seemed to want to be somewhere else, doing something else... more »

Writers and their fathers. In the space between what Joyce knew about his father, a violent drunk, and what Joyce felt about him, the author forged his style... more »

It’s tempting to think that enchantment ended with the Enlightenment. But what of Isaac Newton’s alchemy, the Frankfurt School’s occult leanings, Americans’ belief in demonic possession?... more »

A strange first job. After Oxford, Anthony Powell joined perhaps the only publishing house run by someone who hated books and considered authors “a natural enemy”... more »

The literature of identity can be self-obsessed, isolating, and overwhelmingly aggrieved. But it can also rally us to the cause of individual freedom... more »

Cy Twombly fell for Robert Rauschenberg, an Italian heiress, and, reportedly, his own assistant. His art, like his love life, was inscrutable... more »

George Scialabba is a mind out of time. His temper — a radical who demonstrates the virtues of conservatism — is the very opposite of what passes for serious thought these days... more »

Gandhi: Behind the cuddly icon was a relentlessly counterintuitive thinker — self-sacrifice over self-interest, obligations over rights, dying over killing... more »

The Iliad and Odyssey shaped behavior in the Greek world. How so? One example: they tarnished the reputation of daytime sex for well over a millennium... more »

Unambiguous identities – and the politics of identity – may be illusions. But when they are widely accepted, illusions become very powerful social facts... more »

Life has sped up. We ruthlessly divide our time into efficient units. We even walk faster than we used to. Time to slow down... more »

Work: The Greeks reviled it; the Judeo-Christian tradition thought it could lead to redemption. We think it’s simply what one does... more »

For Marilynne Robinson, the culprit behind our ills is disbelief, which neatly fits her theological disposition. But are we really suffering a surfeit of rationality... more »

The average person consumes 100,000 words a day. But are we paying close attention to what we read?... more »

Translators should themselves be artists, argues a new book. The goal: not just to accurately recreate a work of literature, but to enhance it... more »

“I did not feel guilty,” said Doris Lessing of the children she abandoned in Africa. But she also compared guilt to an iceberg, with “ninety-nine hundredths hidden”... more »

Young Oscar Wilde: Physically unprepossessing – overgrown, clumsy, “slab-faced” – he was nonetheless magnetic. But his talent was to annoy as much as to amuse... more »

The reluctant genius and the relentless promoter. Though Max Brod turned out his own books, his life was defined by the items he seized from the late Kafka’s desk... more »

Lionel Trilling's letters reveal a man who was deft, a bit dull, and often depressed. Above all, a man exquisitely attuned to small slights... more »

Yes, utopian projects deserve deep suspicion. Moral progress is, after all, fragile. But can our highest aspiration really be a purpose-free life?... more »

For 25 years, Irad Kimhi has perfected the résumé of an academic failure. Or is the philosopher a hidden giant hampered by his perfectionism?... more »

Essays & Opinions

"It remains startling to me how little many men have to do to earn intellectual authority," says Jill Lepore, "and how much more women have to do"... more »

The American Memoir tells a recurring story of personal responsibility and freedom from history. As Christopher J. Lebron explains, it is a lie... more »

Difficult books are difficult in different ways. Some are just plain bad. But readability is not always good. The case for difficult books... more »

Calling bullshit has a venerable intellectual pedigree. And why not? Bullshitters get the kudos without the work... more »

Wars of conquest have declined sharply over the past seven decades. Could a treaty signed in 1928 be the cause?... more »

Art, before the age of mechanical reproduction. The four extant original manuscripts of Old English poetry are a reminder of the yawning void of history... more »

When Donald Hall turned 80, he’d stopped writing poetry. He'd lost 60 pounds. He was ill and depressed. Then he rediscovered prose... more »

A golden age of English literature began under a draconian monarchy. For Thomas Wyatt, this meant collaborating with — and falling victim to — tyrants... more »

The whitewashing of antiquity. Fascists have long looked to the ancient world as a source of ideology and pride. They are abetted by a generation of scholars... more »

Francis Perey’s eureka moment had come. Unfortunately, the physicist’s landmark paper was “maddeningly repetitious philosophical froth”... more »

Who would have thought that n+1, largely founded by men, would in time become the world’s least boring journal of feminist theory?... more »

The art world is a place of cravenness and tropospheric wealth, beset by toxic rot and junkie-like behavior. Yet it can still produce good work... more »

Beyond dark and stormy nights. Gothic literature is more than candles and curses. Its chief concerns are terror, the sublime, and the uncanny... more »

True artistic freedom comes from not caring about quality, métier, or meaning. Magritte found it when he set those all aside to make a joke... more »

Claude Debussy, a "very, very strange man," was an acutely literary composer. His music, heavily influenced by poetry, is easy to love but hard to explain... more »

The Swedish Academy’s decision to take a year off from awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature brings to a close more than a century of foolishness... more »

The workings of the multimillion-dollar machine that publishes academic journals are complex. They're also implausible and outrageous... more »

The opponents of political correctness are not a pitiable collection of angry old white men. They are people of all ages and all colors protective of their liberties... more »

“He was a boy raised on a river.” Is there anything new to say about Mark Twain? In a slew of new books, scholars try and fail... more »

An orthodoxy has taken hold of intellectual, cultural, and academic life. Its hallmarks: moral preening, lazy attitudinizing, and grim-faced virtue-signaling. The remedy: Marxists against wokeness... more »

"The university has nurtured many partisan causes to which its members can devote themselves, but there seem to be few partisans of the university itself left"... more »

What happens when our writers and thinkers express themselves through Facebook instead of on the page? Imagine Herzog in the era of the status update... more »

Precision "pervades our lives entirely, comprehensively, wholly," says Simon Winchester. But does the abstract concept have a precise history? Yes. It begins in 1776... more »

The pernicious social dynamics of the internet. We overshare about our personal lives and fail to understand those of others. Narcissism spreads; empathy vanishes... more »

What is the point of a bookish life? It's not to become knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. It is to become wiser... more »

When his aged father and newborn son died within a few years of each other, William James took an interest in "ghosts and clairvoyances and raps and messages from spirits"... more »

Women do the lion’s share of the book reading, editing, agenting, and buying. Still, we live in a literary culture that ignores women... more »

What was the Frankfurt School? Twentieth-century Europe had exposed civilization’s dark impulses. Did the new reality demand a new style of critique?... more »

Are you charming? (Hint: If you think you are, you’re probably not.) But what is charm? Easier to determine what it isn't... more »

Is the “grievance studies” hoax an effort to spotlight fashionable nonsense in the academy, a salutary correction, or a reactionary hit job?... more »

To be called a plagiarist is arguably the most existential accusation a writer can face. But perhaps borrowing is simply part of art... more »

The painter Sam Rothbort’s pacifist ideals led him to open a no-kill egg farm in the 1920s. His unlikely past: fighting in an armed resistance... more »

Soft murmurs, the shuffling of papers, the groan of book carts. Libraries have a steady, timeless feel, as if there we can live forever... more »

A new culture war. The moralizers are young, and their quest is for representation and social justice. The result? Dull art... more »

The apostle of pastiche, Leonard Bernstein flitted between high and low, sacred and profane, romanticism and kitsch. He was music’s public intellectual... more »

“It was tedious & futile & fatiguing. I found I was not at all frightened; only very bored & very weary.” Evelyn Waugh at war... more »

Alarmed at the progress of his research, the German nuclear physicist Felix Houtermans sent a secret telegram to America: “Hurry up. We are on the track”... more »

Most novels include one or two mediocrities flitting about. Those are B.D. McClay's people. She writes in praise of books that linger on the unattractive and uninteresting... more »

The demise of the Village Voice underscores the end of Greenwich Village bohemia — which invites a question about the beginning... more »

Banned Book Week is upon us. Does this annual orgy of inaccuracy, overstatement, and self-righteousness serve any purpose? Yes... more »

For some students, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is their introduction to what it means to think historically. It is a work of unalloyed certainty — and danger... more »

Does Ian Buruma's abrupt departure from the New York Review of Books mean that editors will be reluctant to take risks? Laura Kipnis is concerned... more »

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 »