Philip Roth reviews his own biographer

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Mountains in the Snow, by Erich Heckel © akg-images/Artists Rights Society, New York City Philippe Sands’s remarkable 2016 book, East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against…

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A science-fiction pioneer finds posthumous fame

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Helen Frankenthaler’s earthbound genius

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Lovers and Time, by Alex Kanevsky © The artist. Courtesy Dolby Chadwick Gallery, San Francisco Danielle McLaughlin’s debut novel, The Art of Falling (Random House, $28), recounts a tumultuous season…

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The languid pleasures of Nuri Bilge Ceylan

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Tove Ditlevsen’s relentless clarity

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“Modena, 1973,” by Luigi Ghirri, from The Map and the Territory, which was published in 2018 by MACK © The artist. Courtesy MACK It has been oddly comforting these past…

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The story of character

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On Alfred Hayes

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Blick auf den Tiergarten mit weißen Kugeln (Parkbild), by Max Beckmann © akg-images When we try to get at a work of art, words of criticism fail worse than anything—they…

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The difficult pleasures of William Gaddis

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On the perils of novelizing one’s life

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A self-portrait by Francisco Goya, 1810 © akg-images/Nimatallah The best-known works of the great Spanish artist Francisco Goya do not give the impression of having been created by a particularly…

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Wendy Carlos’s music of the spheres

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The soothing clarity of Shirley Hazzard

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Elegy IV (detail), from the series Arctic Elegy, by DM Witman © The artist. Courtesy Klompching Gallery, Brooklyn, New York “Don’t say that he’s hypocritical / Say rather that he’s apolitical,” Tom…

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The corrupt business of deportation

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On the Jesus trilogy

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If it weren’t for the black death, the fourteenth-century merchant Francesco di Marco Datini might have left no trace in history. A workaholic Tuscan with offices from Bruges to Barcelona,…

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Charles Bowden’s borderlands

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On Sylvia Townsend Warner

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Spreading Fires During the Great Kanto Earthquake, a newspaper illustration of the 1855 earthquake in Edo, Japan. Courtesy Special Collections, Tokyo Metropolitan Central Library A metropolis can transform, and even…

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Wordsworth at 250

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Tracing the origins of the German nation

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A Cotton Office in New Orleans, by Edgar Degas. Courtesy Musée des Beaux-Arts, Pau, France In 1873, while visiting family in America, Edgar Degas painted a scene from his uncle’s…

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On women’s history and group biography

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How not to write about Andy Warhol

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