Our Authors
César Aira
On the occasion of his birthday, novelist César Aira makes a plan
David Alff
On Parking (by Henry Grabar)
On Quarantine (by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley)
Natalie Angier
Noga Arikha
Calvin Baker
Nicholson Baker (drawings)
John Balaban
John Banville
On Jonathan Meiburg's “A Most Remarkable Creature”
Jazmina Barrera
Polina Barskova
Madison Smartt Bell
Yevgenia Belorusets
Christopher Benfey
On Austrian storyteller Adalbert Stifter
On Hunting in America (by Philip Dray)
On the Radical Transcendentalists (by Robert A. Gross)
April Bernard
Emily Bernard
On Imani Perry's Lorraine Hansberry
On Margaret Walker (by Maryemma Graham)
Wendell Berry
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Matthew Bevis
Sven Birkerts
Elaine Blair
Robert Block
On Chasing New Horizons (by Alan Stern)
Mark Bourrie
Local News One Farmer at a Time, The Rise of George McCullagh
Peter Brooks
On Sally Rooney, Philosophy and the Boudoir
Amina Cain
Allen Callahan
On Henry Louis Gates’s “The Black Church”
On Karen Armstrong and John Barton
On Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (by Scot McKnight)
On Reading the Bible While Black (by Esau McCulley)
On Temple Folk and How to Say Babylon (by Aaliyah Bilal and Safiya Sinclair)
On the Book of Job (by Edward Greenstein)
Jorge Carrion
The World’s Most Important Libraries Aren’t the Ones You Think They Are
Christian Caryl
On Colin Thubron, Vibrant Fatalist
On Jeffrey Lewis’s new Doomsday
On The Triumph of Christianity (by Bart Ehlman)
Rebecca Chace
On Francine Prose’s ”The Vixen”
Sarah Chayes
On The Dawn of Everything (by David Graeber and David Wengrow)
Peter Cherches
Peter Cherches finds his frightening simplicity
Variations On a Theme, from Thelonious Monk and Billie Holiday
Éric Chevillard
Phil Christman
Lucille Clifton
Jamie Cohen
On Stewart Brand (by John Markoff)
Maryse Conde
Anna Julia Cooper
Robert Cottrell
Caleb Crain
Mark Danner
On a New Biography of George Kennan (by Frank Costigliola)
Tracy Daugherty
Kathryn Davis
Anna DeForest
Samuel Delany
Jeff Deutsch
Rachel DeWoskin (with Kirun Kapur)
Alone & Remembering Poetry Class in a Time of Pandemic, with Derek Walcott
Anthony Domestico
Jesse Donaldson
On Foxfire’s Appalachia (by Phil Hudgins and Jessica Phillips for Foxfire)
Hugh Eakin
Apollinaire and Picasso, Friendship in a Plague Year
On Alfred Stieglitz (by Phyllis Rose)
On Gertrude Stein's Barnstorming American Tour (by Roy Morris, Jr.)
On Philip Johnson (by Mark Lamster)
Lucy Ellmann
Álvaro Enrigue
Brian Fagan
On the last of the whalers (by Russell Fielding)
On the Pollock Fishery (by Kevin Bailey)
Olive Fellows
Carolyn Ferrell
Ruth Franklin
Ian Frazier
Favorite Book (“True Grit” by Charles Portis)
Chas Freeman
On China’s military (by M. Taylor Fravel)
Benjamin Friedman
On Deaths of Despair (by Anne Case and Angus Deaton)
On the Origins of Cash (by Dror Goldberg)
Katie Gaddini
On “Nonverts” (by Stephen Bullivant)
Atul Gawande
Kim Ghattas
Robert Gipe
Misha Glenny
On Sarah Chayes’s “Corruption in America”
On “The Bridge On the Drina” (by Ivo Andric)
Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.
Irena Grudzińska Gross
On Europe‘s ”Ghost Citizens” (by Łukasz Krzyżanowski)
Durs Grünbein
John Guare
On Elaine Stritch (by Alexandra Jacobs)
Sue Halpern
Giles Harvey
Zoë Heller
On Jean Rhys (by Miranda Seymour)
Sean Hill
Adam Hochschild
Unsung Heroes in Hitler’s Germany (by Mark Roseman)
Michael Idov
Emmanuel Iduma
On The Great Kingdoms of Africa (by John Parker)
Lawrence Jackson
Christine Jacobson
Janet Webster Jones
Franz Kafka
Kirun Kapur (with Rachel DeWoskin)
Alone & Remembering Poetry Class in a Time of Pandemic, with Derek Walcott
Robert Karron
Jane Katch
On Mr. Rogers (by Maxwell King)
Sarah Kerr
On “Bad Mexicans” (by Kelly Lytle Hernandez)
Jamaica Kincaid
I was never really making a garden so much as having a conversation
Stephen Kinzer
On the US military and climate change (by Michael T. Klare)
Adam Kirsch
On Halakhah: The Rabbinic Idea of Law (by Chaim Saiman)
Marianna Kiyanovska
Ann Kjellberg
A Bookstore Grows in the Bronx
Amazon and the Booksellers‘ Valentine
Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Book news in a time of quarantine
Book Thoughts in the Age of Shutdown
Memorial, Memorials, Memory, History
One of these mornings, the chain is going to break …
Prison Writing, Prison Reading
Reading Together, Reading Apart
Return of the Freestanding Book Review!
The Facebook Files, Writing, and Journalism
The Persistent Idyll of the Second-hand Bookshop
Our Partner Booksellers
Michael Klein
Lorraine Kreahling
Alexandra Lange
On Danish Modern (by Maggie Taft)
On Disneyland (by Richard Snow)
David Leavitt
A Small Genre (The Lisbon Novel)
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
The Original Queens of Stand-Up (by Shawn Levy)
Thea Lenarduzzi
Alain Locke
Edward Lucas
J. Vanessa Lyon
Jean McGarry
James Joyce’s Christmas Feasting
On My Dark Room (by Julie Park)
Jeff Madrick
On American Jobs (by David Blanchflower)
On the Subminimum Wage (by Saru Jayaraman)
John Maher
J. S. Marcus
On Robert Walser (by Susan Bernofsky)
Wyatt Mason
Glyn Maxwell
Edward Mendelson
On Hugh Eakin’s ”Picasso‘s War”
On the History of Protestantism (by Alec Ryrie)
On “The Last Englishmen” (by Deborah Baker)
On Typography (by Paul Luna)
Lincoln Michel
Ange Mlinko
Poets Translating (On Simon Armitage and others)
Ray Monk
John Moran
Stephen Mortland
Priyamvada Natarajan
Judith Newman
On Craig Brown’s “Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret”
Geoffrey O’Brien
Meghan O’Gieblyn
Eugene Ostashevsky
Tim Parks
James W. C. Pennington
Alex Pheby
The death of James Joyce, as seen by his daughter Lucia (Northampton, 1941)
Padgett Powell
Francine Prose
Stephen Pyne
On the National Parks (by Gary Machlis and Michael Soukup)
Erik Reece
Spencer Reece
Elliot Reed
Michael Robbins
On Wild Souls (by Emma Marris)
Luis Rodriguez
Abby Rosebrock
Charles Rosen
Robert Rosenfeld
Alex Ross
Ingrid Rowland
A Journey to Ravenna! (by Judith Herrin)
On “The Merits of Women” (by Virginia Cox)
Sumana Roy
Eric Schlosser
Anakana Schofield
Midway On Two Journeys (On Deborah Levy and Oliver Sacks)
On Jorge Carrión’s “Bookshops: A Reader’s History”
On the Secret Life of Cows (by Rosamond Young)
On Two Books About Animals (by Susan Orlean and Thalia Field)
Arthur Schwartz
On Rome’s Jewish cooking (by Leah Koenig)
Madeleine Schwartz
On Letitia Elizabeth Landon (by Lucasta Miller)
Brandon Shimoda
Charles Simic
Mona Simpson
Orville Schell
On Simon Leys (by Philippe Paquet)
Hagith Sivan
How old is the Hebrew Bible? (by Ronald Hendel and Jan Joosten)
Women and the Religion of Ancient Israel (by Susan Ackerman)
Katy Simpson Smith
A. L. Snijders
A. L. Snijders in the country (Translated by Lydia Davis)
Octavio Solis
Christopher Sorrentino
Maria Stepanova
George R. Stewart
Patricia Storace
Asparagus and the Culinary Saint
At Table with Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy
Christmas ghosts and a treat with chestnuts
Clever Grethel’s Roast Chicken
James Stotts
On the Adventures of Maqroll (by Álvaro Mutis)
John Terborgh
On the Insect Apocalypse (by Dave Goulson)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Colin Thubron
On Süleyman the Magnificent (by Christopher de Bellaigue and Kaya Şahin)
Karim Tiro
Isabella Tree
Victoria Uren
Anne Waldman
Marina Warner
On “Accidental Gods” (by Anna Della Subin)
Rosanna Warren
On “Letters to Camondo” (by Edmund de Waal)
Joshua Whitehead
Joy Williams
On Meister Eckhart (by Joel Harrington)
On Richard Powers’ “The Overstory”
On “The Uninhabitable Earth” (by David Wallace-Wells)
On W. G. Sebald (by Carole Angier)
Tobias Wolff
Carter G. Woodson
Mark Wunderlich
Renee Xia
On the Plight of the Uyghurs (by Sean R. Roberts)
Cynthia Zarin
Love Trouble (Shirley Hazzard and Laurie Colwin)