New Books

Michel Houellebecq wrote about terrorism pre-9/11 and provincial protest pre-gilets jaunes. It’s like he’s hired the zeitgeist as his publicity agent... more »

At 39, listless and depressed, Winston Churchill took to the canvas. Although some of his works evoke paint-by-numbers, he was generally a “successful amateur”... more »

The 1943 cast recording of Oklahoma! put the Broadway musical at the center of American popular culture. It didn't stay there for long... more »

His works are not Gothic; they are not parody or satire; they are funny but not jokey. It's weird how Edward Gorey's art is ubiquitous but hard to characterize... more »

In 1889, Debussy visited the world’s fair, which featured the Eiffel Tower. What impressed him more was an opera featuring “a furious little clarinet”... more »

“I will not be ‘famous,’ ‘great,’” wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary in 1933. Also revealed in her private writing: cattiness and casual racism... more »

From the French Revolution to 19th-century Germany to the founding of The New Republic, liberalism has lived many lives. Will it continue to survive?... more »

Iris Murdoch believed that description is never neutral, that our relentless egos block understanding, and that the answer to egotism is love... more »

Boethius is the patron saint of bullshit detection. His self-appointed heir apparent, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, has made it a way of life... more »

“What have I in common with the Jews?” Kafka asked in his diary, adding, “I have hardly anything in common with myself.” He had an equally ambigious relationship with Zionism... more »

The idea of Eve Babitz — sexual outlaw, polymath of pleasure, gifted annalist of the delights and despair of Los Angeles — is more compelling than the author herself... more »

What happens to dead writers at the hands of exegetes or executors? It's a question of estate management, archival avarice, popular renown, and inheritance law... more »

Germaine Greer was a colossus whose vitality and pugnacity made her impossible to ignore. Then she embarked on a path of retrograde rants... more »

Geoff Dyer once described the history of jazz as the history of people picking themselves up off the floor. Mezz Mezzrow was no exception... more »

A novel that alludes to a romance with Roth; a witty window into the world of "thought leadership"; a monumental biography of Frederick Douglass: What were the best books of 2018? ... NPR... New Yorker... The Atlantic... Christian Lorentzen... NY Times critics... Publisher's Weekly... Katy Waldman... Time... Mental Floss...... more »

Schadenfreude: the long history, complicated etymology, and many uses of one of life's grubby but essential little pleasures... more »

William T. Vollmann’s 1,300-page book on climate change is overloaded with statistics, footnotes, and citations. Buried within is an intellectual autobiography... more »

It took four years for Tolstoy to write Anna Karenina, as he complained about the work, defamed the novel, and considered killing himself... more »

For Wittgenstein, philosophy had no “problems,” only “puzzles.” This did not stop him from threatening Karl Popper with a fireplace poker over a philosophical difference... more »

Why does Nietzsche continue to beguile? It's the libertine aphorisms, unhappy life, tragic end, appropriation by the Nazis, and the extent to which he's misunderstood... more »

With her husband gone, Sylvia Plath rode horses, took up smoking, and cherished her independence. “Ted may be a genius,” she wrote, “but I’m an intelligence”... more »

To understand how fascism works, don't blur the distinction between conservatism and fascism. It numbs us to legitimate warnings, and trivializes the dangers that we face... more »

When Bach was in his mid-40s and at the height of his creative powers, he suddenly began recycling old material instead of composing original material. Why?... more »

They said it could not be done — Thomas Cromwell was simply “not biographable.” And yet now, in 700+ plus pages, the definitive biography has arrived... more »

Few gestures are universal, and so the wrong one in the wrong place can lead to violence. A dictionary of gestures, therefore, might just save lives... more »

Marcel Proust began writing as a snob but ended it as the great critic of snobbery. How a dandiacal dilettante became a penetrating social observer... more »

The Greeks had a word for it (epichairekakia), as did the Romans (malevolentia) and the French (joie maligne). In English we’ve adopted “schadenfreude”... more »

Boiling in your own pot; torture via a long, flaming knife; being impaled on a fiery spit — The Penguin Book of Hell is an anthology of sadistic fantasies... more »

Bearing a grudge is no cause for shame. Resentments remind us that our senses are attuned. If we eliminated grievances, we'd eliminate moral judgment... more »

Pity the would-be biographer of Germaine Greer. Not only is she recalcitrant, but there's little the oversharing writer hasn't already exposed... more »

“Puns about German sausage are generally considered the worst.” A new philosophical study of comedy is not immune to punmanship... more »

Who was Hans Asperger? A clinician doing his best in difficult circumstances? Or a Nazi who sent children to their deaths?... more »

Students trained to speak in a rarefied lexicon, vying for professors’ approval, competing for a few, unstable jobs: "The M.F.A. is graduate school in a funhouse mirror"... more »

Philip Larkin wrote 4,000 letters home, some masterpieces of curmudgeonly comedy. But over time, his ample gift hardened from playfulness into habit... more »

Writing weakens the intellect, or so claimed Socrates. Despite this, two new books set out to rehabilitate classical philosophy... more »

Philip Johnson wasn't a casual Nazi. He was very Nazi — the sort who insisted on reading Mein Kampf in the original German... more »

“Was I a man or was I a jerk?” Saul Bellow inquired on his deathbed. The answer was both... more »

Lord Byron was “dangerous to know” and “irritable to the point of mental disease.” The women in his life responded accordingly.... more »

To understand the semiotics of sleep, consider its opposite. Insomnia feels like collage, like looking at the world atilt... more »

Essays & Opinions

The re-fructifying of Saul Bellow. After he recovered from a coma incurred in the Caribbean, his 80s may constitute the best final act in American letters... more »

How wide is the circle of ideas not worthy of discussion? Which beliefs should be judged as “out of bounds” — and who gets to be the referee?... more »

Death of the author? Barthes’s 1967 declaration made sense at the time, but authorship has been hard to do away with... more »

The philosopher’s penchant for argument is grounded in a conception of the good life and the duties of good citizenship. It also inevitably makes him come off as an arsehole... more »

A viciously critical review, with finely honed mockery and acid-tipped one-liners, is born of righteous fury. But it can become pure joy... more »

Victor Klemperer’s diaries, which recorded the creeping Nazification of German society, are masterful; his earlier reports are less so... more »

An American philosopher in Paris must contend with the noisome beast known as "French theory." And marvel at how Derrida was able to tantalize the Anglophone world... more »

Essays and essayists. The form requires a combination of exactitude and evasion, and — on writers’ part — sensitivity, tenderness, and slyness... more »

What did Homer mean when he described the sea as "wine-dark": red, white, or rosé? Such debates keep the classical language alive — and Mary Norris enthralled... more »

How do you judge fiction? How do you say one story is better than another? Doing so is hard to distinguish from deep prejudice. Or you can use a softer word, like taste... more »

We're years into an unprecedented social experiment: the moneyballing of human existence. The early results are in, and they're not encouraging. We now think algorithmically, subjectively... more »

The search engine, initially an attempt to map human meaning, now defines human meaning. It controls, rather than simply catalogs or indexes, human thought... more »

At 29, Percy Bysshe Shelley still looked like a child. He continued sailing paper boats into adulthood. Was his poetry similarly immature?... more »

Writing in 1956, Erich Fromm predicted the "disintegration of love in Western culture.” His words were prescient. We are falling out of love with love... more »

2018 featured memorable essays on our historical moment, on the viciousness of online life, and, weirdly, on tigers. David Brooks gives out his Sidney Awards... more » ...... more »

The ugly truth about Alice Walker. For years she has expressed odious views about Judaism. For years she was given a pass. Perhaps that's changing... more »

In old age, everything droops, wrinkles, falls out, detumesces, or dries up. But, as Susan Gubar explains, literary life continues... more »

Gerard Manley Hopkins died in 1889. He’d published only a few poems, and there was no great clamor for more — before a beguiling 1918 edition was released... more »

Although he played up his eccentricities in public, Edward Gorey was a shy, private man who took perverse pride in the dullness of his own existence... more »

Einstein's "God Letter" is by reputation a definitive statement from a renowned genius. It isn't. It's an artful declaration of a conventional belief... more »

The fifth-century British writer Pelagius was trounced in his debate with Augustine, dismissed as a “huge, bloated Alpine dog, weighed down with Scottish oats.” Still, Pelagius had the last laugh... more »

Lionel Trilling is an anachronism, though one with much to say about the present moment. He is salient for all the ways he did not think and act like us... more »

What is an aphorism? A record of fleeting, sometimes contradictory, moments of certainty. They don’t cohere, which is part of the fun... more »

Your new iPal is a humanoid robot designed to provide companionship. You face with a new version of an old question: Can a computer have inner subjective experiences?... more »

So you've been shamed. What to do if you've been wrongfully shamed, or rightfully so but want your life back? Helen Andrews knows from experience... more »

Would human extinction be a tragedy? A philosophical investigation reasons that it would, but that it might also leave the world a better place... more »

The culture industry is wrapped in a security blanket of cloying agreeability. Where is the ruthless critique, the anger, the hate?... more »

The Weekly Standard is dead. Let us now praise that witty, quixotic, hectoring, charming, maddening, and smart magazine... more »

Last sentences in novels often invoke the book’s title — or moths (Nabokov); or nautical imagery (Conrad). But the best last lines aren’t endings at all... more »

The shackles of moral perfection. Both utilitarianism and rationalism, embraced fully, create servants. The nonmoral parts of life make us who we are... more »

Should poetry be political? For the longest time, the answer was no. Then came 9/11, and a change in the artistic psyche... more »

Harper Lee’s father was named Amasa but answered to “Atticus Finch.” Does the real-world inspiration for a literary hero merit celebration or condemnation?... more »

Ponderous, posturing, even silly, Hemingway’s fiction becomes more out of fashion every year. So why do we still read it?... more »

Pleasure and expertise. Those who play tennis well or cook well experience a kind of pleasure unavailable to others. Is the same true for those who read well?... more »

“We’re in hot water”; “the straw that breaks the camel’s back”; “a leopard cannot change its spots”: What exactly makes a cliché a cliché?... more »

The story of how a cripplingly shy, often sickly boy became Andy Warhol is also the story of our own antihumanist swerve... more »

“What a complex foamy mixture a couple is,” wrote Elena Ferrante. In our eagerness to uncover her identity, have we erred in assuming she is one person?... more »

Art is a way of contending with life, even in its shadiest corners. But does that cover artists like Egon Schiele, who displayed interest in prepubescent girls?... more »

Should studying literature be fun? Not if you want to be a serious scholar. Thus aesthetic appreciation became the province of nonacademic critics... more »

How did an uncharismatic Oxford medievalist create the most popular adventure story of the 20th century? Tolkien's stories had ideas, not ideology... more »

Want to be an artist? Jerry Saltz has some advice: Know what you hate, scavenge, be delusional, and, of course, accept that you will probably be poor... more »

Besides book blurbs, there are “pre-blurbs” and even “pre-pre-blurbs.” The blurbing industrial complex is out of control and must be destroyed... more »

Selfies, with machinelike monotony, reduce us to predictable characters. Can they become artistic statements, like self-portraits once were?... more »

We build the boxes we live in, write on square pieces of paper, and invented the four-cornered frame. This frame is what separates us from nature itself... more »

In the works of Richard Rorty and Michael Walzer is an argument for how to liberate the left from itself. Their ideas can look feeble or sentimental or unsophisticated. They are, in fact, necessary... more »

Saint Oscar, Wilde the Irishman, Wilde the wit, classicist, socialist, martyr for gay rights: The Oscar Wilde industry gives us the Wilde we need — or at least the Wilde that sells... more »

William H. Gass compiled a final collection near the end of his life, resigned to the fact that his real legacy would be buried by the fickle winds of literary opinion... more »

What's the burden of the black public intellectual? She defends and explains black culture, and argues for black people’s humanity, but does so for a white audience... more »

The greatest book ever written about the theater? The Season by William Goldman, who died recently. What makes it great? Its bluntness... more »

An idiom is like a musical phrase; a cliché is like an earworm. "If idioms help us think outside the box, clichés box us in"... more »