New Books

Eric Hobsbawm against the identitarians. Centering gender, race, and sexuality was not his “kind of history.” Nor was it Karl Marx’s... more »

Gilgamesh, a 4,000-year-old epic, is violent and sexually explicit. Why have translators mostly made it sound lofty?... more »

The most interesting way to look at Edward Said is to see the political and the literary as having always been conjoined... more »

What made Cormac McCarthy a great writer? The sound of his prose, in its full excess and strangeness... more »

“Liberalism’s deepest grounding,” Judith Shklar writes, is the belief “that cruelty is an absolute evil”... more »

A wild sprite haunting the West Yorkshire moors? Not quite. Emily Brontë’s legend distracts from what we know about her life... more »

“There was a generation of liberal arts majors for whom Foucault’s The Order of Things was more exhilarating than any contemporary novel, and I was one of them”... more »

A profusion of Plath. Never has so much of her work – journals, letters, prose, poems – been available. Is it too much?... more »

White paint — initially made from lead soaked in vinegar and then mixed with a binder — has a rich history. And unhinged critics ... more »

Years before Darwin, an evolutionary treatise rattled Tennyson’s faith, but didn't break it. "Science was still a delight and a visionary promise”... more »

“What is our contemporary digital-infused life if nothing else but a sustained experiment in self-deception?”... more »

When the future is hard to see, Lea Ypi’s grandmother told her, learn from the past. She knew what she was talking about... more »

Literary culture has changed, often for the worse. But that doesn't mean the world is also getting worse... more »

Robert Frost was both a skeptical believer and a believing skeptic. Yet his letters reveal a soul closer to despair... more »

After his 10-year-old daughter died, Darwin sought solace in barnacles. For the naturalist, grief was best relieved by work... more »

Woodworking, building computers, photography — why is so much of Francis Fukuyama’s memoir concerned with his hobbies?... more »

Are single-mindedness and arrogance what’s required to write great fiction? Consider the case of Cormac McCarthy... more »

The problem with pandemic novels: Their authors were scared, unmoored, and used their fiction as a staging ground for psychological parables... more »

A poem you can put your beer on. The mimeo revolution of the 1960s generated a deluge of experimental printing... more »

Contrarianism and controversy raised John Berger’s reputation as writer — while degrading his mental health... more »

Johannes Brahms has long been misunderstood as uncivilized. He wasn't rude. He was witty — quick, cutting, and funny... more »

Perverseness drove Edgar Allan Poe to ruin, or the brink of it, again and again. It was also the source of his inspiration... more »

Egomaniacs, psychos, and informants. Why is it we look past all sorts of ugliness and insist on mythologizing revolutionaries?... more »

The phrase "fiercely private" is often applied to artists who secretly love the attention. Anita Brookner wasn’t one of them... more »

In place of Middlemarch and Montaigne, we have Mr. Beast. The post-literacy thesis sounds compelling, until you begin to unpack it... more »

For Chekhov, doomsaying was an ingeniously disguised form of sloth — and modern disenchantment an epidemic worth curing... more »

“Reading is like exercise. You have to go a little bit beyond what you’re comfortable with, a little bit more than you can really do”... more »

Critical theory can be used to convey sophistication — but when it goes wrong, the whiff of pretension and arrogance is unmistakable... more »

The split between Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye led to no shortage of bad blood. But were their theories of literary inheritance that far apart?... more »

Why collect stamps? Explanations include nostalgia, anal-retentiveness, erotic frustration, and the desire to escape into a remote, private world... more »

Stephen Hawking, brilliant and extraordinary, was spoken of with reverence and affection. Those who knew him have a dimmer view... more »

Prophets of literary doom keep writing books about the death of reading. The genre refutes the thesis ... more »

Would an influential jeremiad against American literature’s devotion to emotional immaturity change writerly habits? Alas, no... more »

“In Silicon Valley, science fiction is neither a slight nor an incidental entertainment,” says Jill Lepore. “Instead it’s taken as a form of technical writing, a set of assembly instructions”... more »

At 83, Terry Eagleton is fixated on death, which he unnervingly describes as “the erotic bliss of yielding to an impregnable power"... more »

Helen Vendler spent a lifetime writing about lyric poetry, yet her criticism always started from frustration, not certainty... more »

Literature without lust? For Leslie Fiedler, the American canon comprised adventure books, sea tales, and other prepubescent diet fare... more »

During the golden age of Oxbridge dons, intellectual elites were treated as a national treasure. Then came Margaret Thatcher... more »

Rachel Cusk’s new novel was billed as “literary scandal of the year.” Strip away the controversy and it’s instantly forgettable... more »

Essays & Opinions

James Fessenden was indolent, wrote little, and inspired two of the most charismatic intellectuals of his time... more »

We may daydream about a frictionless world, but consider tribology — the science of interacting surfaces — and you’ll realize that’s nonsense... more »

“What does it feel like to commune with AI spirits? It is a shot of caffeine. It is a dizzy spell. It is a download from the universe.”... more »

We’re in the midst of an attention crisis. All is disruption and distraction. John Berger saw it coming – and foresaw its consequences... more »

Howl at 70: “The last poem to hit the world with the impact of news and grip it with the tenacity of a pop song”... more »

“Lobster and duck at the Johnson White House.” The success of Ralph Ellison’s individualist crusade resulted in an extreme version of public life... more »

Somewhere in the 1980s, education became “learning,” and reading became a skill for completing tasks. We're living with the consequence... more »

Arundhati Roy: "Vitiating the fundamental relationship between humans and language will undermine all semblance of social coherence"... more »

The canonization of Peter Hujar. Known for his photographs of the oversexed New York art scene, his work is finally receiving its due... more »

A Ph.D. certifies expertise in a discipline. But ignorance is a precondition for thinking something new. James Miller explains... more »

What was Unmuzzled OX? Andy Warhol posed with it. So, improbably, did Rodney Dangerfield — in a robe, with a lapdog... more »

The literary world’s revulsion toward AI nurtures a self-defeating refusal to understand it, and thus how to resist it... more »

Mencken is still relevant, but which Mencken? There were many — some confounding, some repellent, others bracing and hilarious ... more »

Silicon Valley’s self-styled futurists build marvelous machines. Their politics, though, recycle discredited ideas. Jill Lepore explains... more »

Generational analysis is almost always nonsense," says Leon Wieseltier. No one told Yale's Kent Professor of Law and History... more »

Why don’t little magazines like n+1, The Point, and The Drift produce more book reviews? Ross Barkan details an emerging problem... more »

“The real secret to beating envy is to realize that envy, in addition to being a great vice and an internal poison, is a drag”... more »

From the perspective of a career academic, the discourse in large parts of literary Substack appears worrisomely thin and uninformed... more »

"Lust in Chekhov’s story is a humble sin, worthy of pity. It causes no wars and burns no buildings"... more »

For as long as there have been writers, they have analyzed, lamented, navel-gazed, and mythologized the writing life... more »

“The word ‘audiophile’? has a wine-sipping pretension that I hate,” says Colin Vanderburg. “But sometimes an ugly shoe fits”... more »

AI doomers and apocalyptic futurists are weird. Also, their prophecies risk pernicious downsides. That doesn't mean they're wrong... more »

As an AI-generated sameness permeates “creative” work and the knowledge economy, we’re entering an era of bleh... more »

Harold Cruse was as pure an autodidact as any 20th-century university scholar. Tuskegee wouldn't hire him. Michigan gave him tenure... more »

In his diary, the Italian litterateur Cesare Pavese boasted: “I am king. In the course of ten years, I have done it all.” Then he set to arranging his death... more »

Glenn Gould was fabulously neurotic, opinionated, and flamboyant. Seventy years on, his Bach still sets the standard... more »

Annie Dillard “was a sort of drill sergeant of human consciousness: determined, always, to force herself, and others, to see”... more »

“The body could have been that of a hobo.” The life — and death — of Victor Serge is evidence that years spent on the barricades take a toll... more »

How a young Roger Scruton, an apolitical and unusually charming Cambridge undergraduate, became Britain's most reviled intellectual... more »

“The precarity of art in the 21st century has led Gen Z to forsake subcultural credibility for an instrumentalized careerism”... more »

To teach students how to think, shut down the Wi-Fi, scramble the cell signal, and send them to weeklong retreats in the deep, dark woods... more »

Dwight Macdonald was famous for writing with a sneer. His criticism now reads less like erudition than compulsive, gleeful bullying... more »

Nature rightly insists that we must learn from the tragedy of Jason Arday. Unfortunately the journal has learned the wrong lessons... more »

In the winter of 1988, Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay while visiting his in-laws in Las Vegas. He's been fending off critics ever since... more »

Time speeds up and slows down; days blend together to the point of indistinguishability — time disorientation is real... more »

The extraordinary achievement of Moby-Dick is to unroll the blank sheet on which modernity will write itself... more »

Once again this year, Vinita Prabhakar assigned her college students a short story she'd taught for a decade. This time, she lost her job... more »

The political right often acts in bad faith in its attacks on academia; in response, academics lapse into tendentious moralism... more »

Americans are indifferent to art but obsess over art heists. "It’s as though a nation of teetotalers chooses, year after year, to hang out in bars... more »

Broke and in search of a sinecure, Edgar Allan Poe went to Washington in 1843 to try to meet the president’s son. A fiasco ensued... more »

In 1970, 1 in 13 four-year degrees was in English. Today it's 1 in 60. What happened? “Canon" became a dirty word... more »

Siegfried Kracauer believed films could foretell political disaster. What does his approach make of today’s cinema?... more »

No one was more baffled by his celebrity than Albert Einstein himself: "Why is it that nobody understands me and everybody likes me?"... more »

Before Godot, Beckett wrote a study of Proust and the redemptive force of art. He spent the next few decades abandoning that faith... more »

Frank O'Hara packed 100 references into 500 lines. Even his most devoted readers miss most of them... more »

What is intelligence? A vice president at Google aims to find out, ignoring decades of lessons from cognitive science and linguistics... more »

Leszek Kolakowski, canonized in Poland, remains a stranger in Oxford, Berkeley, and Montreal, the places that sheltered him... more »

Paul Celan's childhood spanned seven languages and one vanishing world. His poetry created space to mourn and remember and survive ... more »

Who is the greatest short story writer of all time? According to one data cruncher, it’s not Chekhov or Barthelme, but Joyce Carol Oates... more »

"The thought that Socrates would care about how his icon is fashioned seems strange to me, but the thought that Plato would care is not strange"... more »