On the enduring legacy of Marshal Pétain

Read more

On May 21, 1991, in the third-floor men’s room at the University of Chicago Divinity School, a student noticed a hand dangling beneath one of the partitions, already turning blue.…

Read more

The grand, gruesome theories of René Girard

Read more

Did you get this message?, by Esther Pearl Watson © The artist. Courtesy Vielmetter Los Angeles So you’ve seen a UFO—great! May I suggest keeping a lid on it? The…

Read more

On Annie Ernaux’s spectacular impersonality 

Read more

A few years ago I found myself close to an episode of tabloid intrigue. A friend’s uncle was accused of murdering his wife in a rich Connecticut town. He attempted suicide…

Read more

On Zadie Smith and the Gen X novel

Read more

Read more

Read more

Colson Whitehead’s half-true Harlem

Read more

A revisionist view of the drug wars

Read more

Blue Self-Portrait, by Arnold Schoenberg, circa 1910. Courtesy the Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna The Lexicon of Musical Invective may be the only music reference book compiled mainly out of spite.…

Read more

Human Lock, by Vojtěch Kovařík. Courtesy the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paolo, Brussels, New York City The title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s new novel, Kairos (New Directions, $25.95), refers…

Read more

On Chuck Berry

Read more

The novel form is capacious and elastic, in some instances deployed like a magnifying glass on a water droplet, and in others as a panoramic lens to encompass a vast…

Read more

On losing a father and finding Stoicism

Read more

Left: “Milan Kundera, Prague, 1969,” by Gisèle Freund © The artist. IMEC/Fonds MCC/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, New York City. Courtesy Galerie Franz Swetec, Düsseldorf. Right: “Rising of Rudé právo,” by…

Read more

Charles Portis and the art of getting out in time

Read more

The long century of Ernst Jünger

Read more

Self-Portrait, 1901, by Pablo Picasso © 2023 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society, New York City/Musée National Picasso-Paris Picasso is to art as Kleenex is to tissues. Few artists have…

Read more

Outback Gathering, by Mel Brigg © The artist. Courtesy Wentworth Galleries, Sydney Anyone who has seen the Australian outback knows that it defies description. The country’s pioneer history is relatively… 

Read more

How not to write an action movie

Read more

Malaga Girl, Navigation of Bones, by Daniel Minter © The artist. Courtesy Greenhut Galleries, Portland, Maine Like William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Paul Harding’s imaginary New England…

Read more

On Cormac McCarthy

Read more

Pearl, by Gail Spaien © The artist. Courtesy Nancy Margolis Gallery “Animals are in trouble all over the world.” So begins Justice for Animals (Simon and Schuster, $28.99), a call to…

Read more

How not to become an anarchist 

Read more

The Ottoman army capturing Belgrade, from a sixteenth-century manuscript © Gianni Dagli Orti/Shutterstock The finest historical fiction—Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, for example—renders the strange grippingly familiar; so too do…

Read more

A provocative history of Indigenous America

Read more