It’s time to challenge our country’s dangerous obsession with self-reliance.
The narrator in Rebecca Makkai’s novel I Have Some Questions for You has a healthy skepticism of true crime—but a decades-old murder pulls her in deep.
Despite a history of embarrassment, the Academy has somehow managed to hold on to its prestige.
The Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez shows how violence can haunt and destabilize a civilization.
Bob and Sheryl Guterl saw their family as a kind of “ark for the age of the nuclear bomb” and attempted to gather “two of every race.”
Searching for Virginia Woolf on the Isle of Skye
Ireland’s fiction laureate has a special understanding of the human heart.
Censored and then forgotten, Anatoly Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar, about the Nazi occupation of Kyiv, is again painfully relevant.
Dorothy Sayers’s most famous character is a detective who solves crimes with elegance—but he finds the deeper enigmas of human beings always out of reach.
Americans disparaged the British as arsonists. But the rebels fought with fire too.
His enchanting new novel is a triumph.
I’ve been locked up in maximum-security prisons for two decades. My time on Rikers Island was worse.
Lauren Fleshman’s memoir, Good for a Girl, recalls her life as a runner—and the culture she says the sport needs to change.
Creative partnerships can be a challenge for fragile egos—but they also provide a lifeline in difficult times.
It took a pandemic to imagine a more humane city.
A 1933 novel tracks the Nazis’ rise to power in real time.
Marguerite Duras’s second novel, The Easy Life, shows that all writing is practice.
What Shirley Hazzard’s life can, and can’t, tell us about her fiction
Scandals have taken a toll, and faith is flagging in Europe and the U.S. But Catholicism isn’t on the wane—it’s changing in influential ways.
Any writer with an interest in probing “American magic and dread”—to borrow a phrase from the novel—is probably in conversation with Don DeLillo, whether or not she knows it.