September 28, 2015
Ronald Reagan: who was that masked man?
June 19, 2015
Under The Algerian Sun: Camus and Daoud
It’s the rare writer who can pick up where Albert Camus — master of midcentury philosophy and fiction — left off in the modern classic,...| More
June 2, 2015
Whitman at War
The best of American poets and the worst of American wars met head-on 150 years ago this summer in Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps, his reflections on...| More
May 28, 2015
James Wood: The Book(s) of Life
The book critic James Wood doesn’t worry about the fate of the novel — after years of reading them, writing them, reviewing them in The New Yorker...| More
May 7, 2015
Knausgaard: The New Novel Thing
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle is sweeping the world in six volumes and 3,600 pages. It’s the novelized memory of a mostly ordinary Scandinavian life, a book...| More
December 11, 2014
Steve Pinker’s Prose Guide
Our friend the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker has written a manual on prose style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century,...| More
December 8, 2014
Boston Noir
Noir heroes tend not to be gangsters of Whitey Bulger’s grandeur; not tough cops either: they’re punched-out boxers and junkies, little perps, prisoners, victims reduced...| More
November 24, 2014
In Memoriam: Richard Eder, The Exemplary Reader
The beloved Richard Eder had the gift he admired in John Updike and that that sparkled in his own prize-winning book reviews: he “snored” metaphors...| More
October 30, 2014
Jill Lepore: The Feminist and the Superhero
The Harvard historian Jill Lepore – prolific, impish, a super-mom, politically engaged and still professorial – is giving us the kinky inside story of Wonder...| More
October 27, 2014
American Horror Stories
165 Halloweens on, we still call on Edgar Allan Poe when we want a disturbing kind of classic — all of the horror with none of the guilt....| More
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