César Aira
On the occasion of his birthday, novelist César Aira makes a plan
David Alff
On the Port of Los Angeles
On Parking (by Henry Grabar)
On Quarantine (by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley)
On Road Ecology
Natalie Angier
On Eugenia Cheng
On Isabella Tree’s Wilding
Noga Arikha
Stories and Neurology
Calvin Baker
Music and Liberation
On David Blight’s Frederick Douglass
Nicholson Baker (drawings)
Alain Corbin (reading)
Rachel Ingalls
Michael Kimmelman (reading)
Clarice Lispector
Charles Portis
Cristina Rivera Garza
Colm Tóibín (reading)
Irene Vallejo (reading)
John Balaban
On the Tale of Kieu
John Banville
On Jonathan Meiburg's “A Most Remarkable Creature”
On Robert Macfarlane's Underland
On Seir. Johan Eklöf’s “The Darkness Manifesto”
On James Marcus’s Emerson
Jazmina Barrera
Readers, Writers, Mothers
Polina Barskova
On Varlam Shalamov
Madison Smartt Bell
On George Garrett
On Rumer Godden
Yevgenia Belorusets
The Stars
Christopher Benfey
Election Day
My Ántonia reading group
On Austrian storyteller Adalbert Stifter
On Hunting in America (by Philip Dray)
On Learning Remotely
On Mark Doty’s Whitman
On the Radical Transcendentalists (by Robert A. Gross)
On the Stevensons
The Kite Contest
April Bernard
Elizabeth Bishop Reading Group
A Reader's Hygge
Catastrophe and Poetry
Colette’s World and Ours
On Angela Carter
On “Dreyer‘s English”
On Elizabeth Hardwick
On Hilary Mantel
On Janet Malcolm
Revisiting Ripley
Emily Bernard
On Imani Perry's Lorraine Hansberry
On Margaret Walker (by Maryemma Graham)
On Saidiya Hartman’s ”Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments”
Wendell Berry
The Writer Going Home
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Letter to Yusef Komunyakaa
Matthew Bevis
On Elizabeth Bishop
On Charles Lamb
Sven Birkerts
35 Magnolia
A Diary
Catalogue
Elaine Blair
On Lucia Berlin
On Oyinkan Braithwaite
On Sally Rooney
On Sylvia Townsend Warner
Robert Block
On Chasing New Horizons (by Alan Stern)
On Chasing New Horizons, an update
On Jessica Stern’s Karadzic
Mark Bourrie
Local News One Farmer at a Time, The Rise of George McCullagh
Peter Brooks
On Alex Ross’s “Wagnerism”
On Sally Rooney, Philosophy and the Boudoir
The lost manuscripts of Proust
What is a libertine?
On Robert Darnton’s “Revolutionary Temper”
Amina Cain
On Solitude
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)
On “God’s Ghostwriters”
On "Who Really Wrote the Bible?" (by William M. Schiedewind)
Elias Canetti
On Literary Mortality and Immortality (Translated Peter Filkins)
Jorge Carrion
The World’s Most Important Libraries Aren’t the Ones You Think They Are
Christian Caryl
On Colin Thubron, Vibrant Fatalist
On Edward Gorey
On Jeffrey Lewis’s new Doomsday
On Jósef Czapski
On The Triumph of Christianity (by Bart Ehlman)
On Werner Herzog
Rebecca Chace
A House Made of Books
On Francine Prose’s ”The Vixen”
On N. K. Jemisin
On Lampedusa’s Island
In Wyoming with Gretel Ehrlich
Sarah Chayes
On Amaryllis Fox
On The Dawn of Everything (by David Graeber and David Wengrow)
On Wade Davis
On Zephyr Teachout and Monopoly
Peter Cherches
Deal with the Devil
My Crisis
Peter Cherches finds his frightening simplicity
Variations On a Theme, from Thelonious Monk and Billie Holiday
Éric Chevillard
Hegel’s Cap
Phil Christman
Inventing the Midwest
Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton Remembers
Jamie Cohen
On Stewart Brand (by John Markoff)
Rachel Cohen
A Chance Meeting: Sarah Orne Jewett
Maryse Conde
I was a book reviewer in Paris
Anna Julia Cooper
Learning and the hidden struggle of women
There is no such things as “mere culture“
Robert Cottrell
New books on Europe’s east
On John McPhee
Caleb Crain
On Pauline Kerschen
Mark Danner
On a New Biography of George Kennan
Tracy Daugherty
On Cormac McCarthy
On Tim O’Brien
Kathryn Davis
On National Velvet
On Jane Eyre, Classics Illustrated No. 39
On Walking
Who Wrote the Fairy Tales
Anna DeForest
On Victoria Chang’s ”Obit”
Samuel Delany
Crisis and Experiment
Andrew Delbanco
On Ursula Parrott
Jeff Deutsch
On Organizing Books, i.e., Ordaining the Universe
Rachel DeWoskin (with Kirun Kapur)
Alone & Remembering Poetry Class in a Time of Pandemic, with Derek Walcott
Anthony Domestico
Poetry on TV
On Rachel Cusk
On Carl Phillips
On Charles Portis
On Eleanor Catton
On Gary Snyder
On Joseph O'Neill
On Lauren Oyler
On Louise Glück
On Marilynne Robinson
On Sigrid Nunez
On Sybille Bedford
On Yiyun Li
On J. Robert Lennon
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
On Gertrude Stein's Barnstorming American Tour
On Philip Johnson
Lucy Ellmann
On Not Going Into Bookstores
Álvaro Enrigue
On Cristina Rivera Garza
On Gabriel García Márquez
On José Emilio Pacheco
On Juan Carlos Onetti
On Roberto Bolaño
On Roque Larraquy
On Samanta Schweblin
Brian Fagan
On the last of the whalers
On the Pollock Fishery
On Tom Seeley, Bee Detective
On the Taste and Ecology of Water
On an Island Atlas
Olive Fellows
Letter from Pittsburgh
Carolyn Ferrell
We must trust in what is difficult
Ruth Franklin
On Susan Orlean’s “The Library Book”
Ian Frazier
Trotsky in the Bronx
On Lists
On Charles Portis
Chas Freeman
On China’s military
Benjamin Friedman
On Deaths of Despair
On the Origins of Cash
Katie Gaddini
On “Nonverts”
Atul Gawande
On Oliver Sacks
Kim Ghattas
On Alaa Abd el-Fattah
Robert Gipe
On Chris Hamby‘s “Soul Full of Coal Dust”
Misha Glenny
On Sarah Chayes’s “Corruption in America”
On Ivo Andric
Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.
On Iman Mersal
Charles Graeber
On Altered States
Irena Grudzińska Gross
On Europe‘s ”Ghost Citizens”
On the Polish national novel, Pan Tadeusz
Durs Grünbein
Linguistic Devastation
John Guare
On Elaine Stritch
On Sondheim
On Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard
Sue Halpern
On Building a Library
Giles Harvey
On Amy Hempel
Zoë Heller
On Jean Rhys (by Miranda Seymour)
Sean Hill
This Land Is My Land
Adam Hochschild
Unsung Heroes in Hitler’s Germany
Michael Idov
On John le Carré
On Serhiy Zhadan
Emmanuel Iduma
On The Great Kingdoms of Africa
Lawrence Jackson
On James McBride
On Percival Everett
Christine Jacobson
On Anthony Grafton
Janet Webster Jones
The Bookseller’s Voice
Franz Kafka
Kafka Argues with His Publishers
Eric Kandel
On the Beholder’s Share
Kirun Kapur (with Rachel DeWoskin)
Alone & Remembering Poetry Class in a Time of Pandemic, with Derek Walcott
Robert Karron
On Lucy Ellmann
On Helen Dewitt
On Robert Stone
On Roy Jacobson
Jane Katch
On Mr. Rogers
Sarah Kerr
On “Bad Mexicans” (by Kelly Lytle Hernandez)
On Carlos Bulosan
On Gina Apostol
Jamaica Kincaid
A Letter to Robinson Crusoe
I was never really making a garden so much as having a conversation
The Kind of Gardener I Am Not
The Walk to Robert Frost’s House
Entries from an Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children
Stephen Kinzer
On the US military and climate change
Adam Kirsch
On Halakhah
Marianna Kiyanovska
Voices of the Lost
Ann Kjellberg
The AI We Live Now
Advance Copy
Advanced Study
Alpha and Omega
Amazon and the Booksellers‘ Valentine
Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction
The Book Fair Returns!
The Book Givers
Book-Neighbors
Book news in a time of quarantine
Book Thoughts in the Age of Shutdown
Books Are Dead! Long Live Books!
Booksellers Look Ahead
Bookselling at the Crossroads
A Bookstore Grows in the Bronx
Borrower and a Lender Be
Boxed Out
Buyouts
Classroom Libraries
DIY Books
Editing in a Perilous Year
The Facebook Files, Writing, and Journalism
Fair Days
Federal Writers Project
Freedom and Kindness
Gatekeepers
Great American Read-a-long
Happy Holidays, buy local!
Heartland Vistas
Hived Mind
Holiday Book Flood
If You Give It Away
Immoderate
Influencing
Infrastructure
Into the Heartland
Isn’t it romantic?
Launch Pad or Slush Pile?
Librarians to the Rescue
Local Control
Making & Unmaking Magazines
Meet the Small Presses
Memorial, Memorials, Memory, History
Minneapolis
Nonfiction
A Notebook on Notes
On Adam Zagajewski
On Jonathan Franzen
On Susan Sontag
On the Road with Bookmobiles
On the Way to the Forum
One of these mornings, the chain is going to break …
Origin Story
Paperback Writers
The Persistent Idyll of the Second-hand Bookshop
Predicting for Text
Prison Writing, Prison Reading
Projections
Reading Together, Reading Apart
Real Time
Return of the Freestanding Book Review!
Sensitivity
Sorting It Out
Spanish Interlude
Streaming Away
Summer Reading
Thought Plutocrats
Translation, Part 1
Translation, Part 2
Two Ceremonies
Unevenly Distributed
Unmerger
Who Killed the Humanities?
Word Workers
The Writer of the Future
Writing and War
Writing in the Crosshairs
Writing, and Journalism
Year-end Book Lists, The Way We Read Now
July 5, 2018
August 5, 2018
September 4, 2018
September 24, 2018
November 5, 2018
January 25, 2019
April 21, 2019
February 6, 2020
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Mac’s Backs
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Print: A Bookstore
Raven Books
Seminary Co-op and 57th Street Books
Source Booksellers
Square Books
Tertulia
Michael Klein
On Kathryn Scanlan at the racetrack
Lorraine Kreahling
On Balzac
Alexandra Lange
On Danish Modern
On Disneyland
David Leavitt
On the Lisbon Novel
On Andrew Holleran
Pedro Lemebel
Two Scenes of Resistance (Translated by Gwendolyn Harper)
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
On “Hacks”
On Anna DeForest
The Original Queens of Stand-Up
James Ledbetter
On an Oral History of The Village Voice
Thea Lenarduzzi
Language Families
Deborah Levy
On J.G. Ballard
Alain Locke
Art or Propaganda?
Edward Lucas
On Ian Kershaw’s Europe
J. Vanessa Lyon
All the Better to See You With
Jean McGarry
Reflections on Equipoise, Ozu/Calder
A Girls’ Education
A new edition of Henry James
How to Write About Food
James Joyce’s Christmas Feasting
On My Dark Room (by Julie Park)
On Dr. Johnson
On Natalia Ginzburg
Jeff Madrick
On American Jobs
On the Subminimum Wage
John Maher
Pandemic Book Sales, What Really Happened?
J. S. Marcus
On a New History of Postwar Germany
On Robert Walser
Laura Marris
On the Horseshoe Crab
Wyatt Mason
On Bohumil Hrabal’s “All My Cats”
On Garth Greenwell
On László Krasznahorkai
On William T. Vollmann
Glyn Maxwell
On Anthony Hecht
Dark Canadee, an imagined workshop in a real lockdown
On Edward Lear
Edward Mendelson
On Hugh Eakin’s ”Picasso‘s War”
On the History of Protestantism
On “The Last Englishmen” (by Deborah Baker)
On Translating the Bible
On Typography
Lincoln Michel
On Caleb Crain
Ange Mlinko
On an Eliot Centenary
On John Berryman
Poets Translating (On Simon Armitage and others)
On Emily Dickinson’s Letters
Ray Monk
On Diaries of Ludwig Wittgenstein
John Moran
Reading Florida, Finding Flannery
Stephen Mortland
Reading Akutagawa
Priyamvada Natarajan
On Ainissa Ramirez
On Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
On Martin Rees
Judith Newman
On Craig Brown’s “Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret”
John Oakes
On Silence
Geoffrey O’Brien
On S.J. Perelman
On Agnes Varda
Arabian Nights of 1934
On Marvin Gaye
On Raymond Queneau’s The Blue Flowers
On Robert Bresson
Paris—Dream of book lovers
Meghan O’Gieblyn
On Barbara Kingsolver
On Writing the Midwest
Eugene Ostashevsky
On Yevgenia Belorusets
Dorothy Parker
On Benito Mussolini, author
Tim Parks
Thinking about Thinking
James W. C. Pennington
What Shall We Do with the White People? (1860)
Alex Pheby
The death of James Joyce, as seen by his daughter Lucia
Bill Porter
On Eliot Weinberger’s Life of Tu Fu
Padgett Powell
Eff the Classics
On Donald Barthelme
On Peter Taylor
On William Trevor
On William Trevor, a postscript
On Ivan Turgenev
Charles Willeford, Known Pulpist
Julia Preston
On Jonathan Blitzer’s Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here
Francine Prose
On David Leavitt
Stephen Pyne
A Personal History of Fire
On the National Parks (by Gary Machlis and Michael Soukup)
Yasmine El Rushed
On Sonallah Ibrahim and Ahmed Naji
On Ghaith Abdul-Ahad
Erik Reece
On Rachel Carson
Spencer Reece
Reading Hopkins
On Aaron Shulman’s ”The Age of Disenchantments”
Elliot Reed
On Shane Bauer’s “American Prison”
On Rachel Kushner’s “The Mars Room”
Michael Robbins
On Translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
On Allen Ginsberg
On Paul Muldoon
Proust and the Grateful Dead
On Rilke
On Wild Souls (by Emma Marris)
On "Nancy"
World in Flames
Days of Unserious Reading
On a History of the Impossible
Luis Rodriguez
A Writer‘s Journey
Abby Rosebrock
Playwriting as Labor and Literature
Charles Rosen
The Performer as Critic
Robert Rosenfeld
A little history of American math books
Alex Ross
On John Luther Adams
Ingrid Rowland
On Judith Herrin’s Ravenna
On “The Merits of Women”
Sumana Roy
Exhaust Pipe
Forest Education
On Surdas
Do Trees Laugh?
Sarah Ruden
On Marilynne Robinson’s Genesis
On Barbara Pym
Eric Schlosser
On Serhii Plokhy, A history of nuclear disaster
Anakana Schofield
Midway On Two Journeys (On Deborah Levy and Oliver Sacks)
On Jorge Carrión’s “Bookshops: A Reader’s History”
On Jenny Diski
On Vivian Gornick
On Xiaolu Guo
On Fleur Jaeggy
The Nun of Kenmare
On the Secret Life of Cows
On Rosemary Tonks
On Two Books About Animals (by Susan Orlean and Thalia Field)
On Clarice Lispector
On Zito Madu
Arthur Schwartz
On Rome’s Jewish cooking
Madeleine Schwartz
On Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Donna Seaman
River of Books
Brandon Shimoda
A House that No Longer Exists
Charles Simic
What is a prose poem?
Mona Simpson
On Lewis Hyde
Summer Reading: Middlemarch
Orville Schell
On Simon Leys
Hagith Sivan
How old is the Hebrew Bible?
Women and the Religion of Ancient Israel
Street Literacy
Katy Simpson Smith
On the wartime letters of General and Mrs. Grant
A. L. Snijders
A. L. Snijders in the country (Translated by Lydia Davis)
Laura J. Snyder
On William James
Octavio Solis
Sam Beckett and I
Saturdays in Juárez
Christopher Sorrentino
A Writer’s Childhood
Maria Stepanova
On Nadezhda Mandelstam
George R. Stewart
Life of a Storm
Patricia Storace
A Christmas present
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
Idella’s Crisp Biscuits, a Florida recipe
My Dinner With Ismail
The Greatest Food Writer
James Stotts
On the Adventures of Maqroll (by Álvaro Mutis)
John Terborgh
On the Insect Apocalypse
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
The Politics of Translation
Colin Thubron
On Süleyman the Magnificent
Karim Tiro
On “Plymouth Colony”
Isabella Tree
On Dan Flores’ “Wild New World”
Victoria Uren
On Ge Fei’s “Peach Blossom Paradise”
On the “Lin Lan” Chinese fairy tales
Anne Waldman
Bard Kinetic
Marina Warner
On “Accidental Gods” (by Anna Della Subin)
On Margaret Atwood
Living in Latin
Quarantine Diary
Viva la Befana!
Rosanna Warren
On Edmund de Waal
Joshua Whitehead
Writing as Relation and Rupture
Joy Williams
On Andrey Platonov
Hemingway and His Houses
On Alexis Wright
On Colm Toíbín
On Fernando Pessoa, et al.
On J. M. Coetzee
On Jim Gauer
On Leonora Carrington
On Mário de Andrade
On Maya Binyam
On Meister Eckhart
On Merrill Gilfillan
On Pip Adam
On Rachel Ingalls
On Richard Flanagan
On Richard Powers’ “The Overstory”
On “The Uninhabitable Earth” (by David Wallace-Wells)
On Vladimir Sorokin
On W. G. Sebald
On Leonora Carrington
Tobias Wolff
On Harry Crews’ “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place”
Michael Wood
On Jean Giono
Carter G. Woodson
Mis-Education
Mark Wunderlich
The National Book Award for Poetry
Renee Xia
On the Plight of the Uyghurs
Barry Yourgrau
On Jean-Patrick Manchette
Cynthia Zarin
A Fin Passing Far Out
On Shirley Hazzard and Laurie Colwin
On Alan Garner
On Colm Toibin’s “The Empty Family”
On Elena Ferrante
On John Burningham
