Joshua Ferris’s half-baked novel of ideas

Read more

How the detective escaped his creator

Read more

Last fall, the Man Booker Prize, the premier award for fiction in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, announced that it was coming to America. Presumably Edward St. Aubyn had already…

Read more

The origins of today’s mass extinction

Read more

The fickle career of Carl Van Vechten

Read more

Discussed in this essay: The Kennan Diaries, by George F. Kennan, edited by Frank Costigliola. W. W. Norton. 688 pages. $39.95. Pity the man’s poor wife. To peruse this generous selection from…

Read more

John Florio — lexicographer, raconteur, and supposed model for Shakespeare’s schoolmaster Holofernes, in Love’s Labour’s Lost — was born in London in 1553 to an unidentified Englishwoman and an Italian Protestant who’d…

Read more

The trial of 12 Years a Slave

Read more

Is E. E. Cummings a serious writer?

Read more

It is inevitable that some readers will take from Evelyn Barish’s biography of the life and misdeeds of Paul de Man the notion that literary theory is a crock. The title…

Read more

America’s self-help gospel

Read more

The limits of autobiography

Read more

Bernard Malamud was born in New York City in 1914 to a family that exchanged Yiddish for English, and he always regretted the loss. Older than Bellow and, in Roth…

Read more

Robert Stone returns home

Read more

A history of ballooning

Read more

The protagonist and narrator of E. L. Doctorow’s twelfth novel, Andrew’s Brain (Random House, $26), is a clumsy cognitive scientist who relates the story of his life from an undisclosed location…

Read more

The Young Writer and the last literary celebrity

Read more

A theory of glamour

Read more

Can Amazon change its predatory ways?

Read more

Ezra Pound’s dictum “Make It New” has long been cited as modernism’s driving objective. Yet Pound, in coining the phrase, was actually drawing on his own (rather free) translation of…

Read more

The hope and hokum of immortality

Read more

The poetry of Middle Eastern uprising

Read more

The title of Margaret Drabble’s new novel, The Pure Gold Baby (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26), refers to “Lady Lazarus,” a poem Sylvia Plath wrote a few months before she committed…

Read more

Thomas Pynchon goes online

Read more

Filming Uganda’s homophobic fits

Read more

Between 1985 and 1993, Bob Shacochis published two story collections and a novel, two of which were finalists for, and one of which won, the National Book Award. As literary…

Read more

The unspent life of J. F. Powers

Read more

Critiques of a life online

Read more