Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book—a key inspiration for Rivka Galchen’s new book — contains a list of “Things That Make One Nervous.” And wouldn’t the blessed event top almost anyone’s list?
Little Labors is a slanted, enchanted...
The quality of today’s literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing — a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist...
In a pulls-no-punches essay intended to provoke rational discussion, Stephen King sets down his thoughts about gun violence in America. Anger and grief in the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School are palpable in this urgent piece...
At twenty-one, just as she was starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable autoimmune disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, paralyzing her for weeks at a time,...
When, in 1997, the International Atomic Energy Agency unanimously elected Mohamed ElBaradei as its next Director General, few observers could have forecast the dramatic role he would play over the next 12 years. Certainly, the stage onto which...
The first full biography of the fearless and brilliant Maria Yudina, a legendary pianist who was central to Russian intellectual life
“Playing with Fire is a ground-breaking work—a phenomenal biography of a towering human spirit of everlasting...
“My bat-like thought-wings would beat painfully in that sudden searchlight,” H.D. writes in Tribute to Freud, her moving memoir. Compelled by historical as well as personal crises, H.D. underwent therapy with Freud during 1933–34, as the...
The dramatic story of the methamphetamine epidemic as it sweeps the American heartland—a timely, moving, very human account of one community’s attempt to battle its way to a brighter future.
Crystal methamphetamine is widely considered...
Everyone has seen the footage: a heavily bearded Saddam Hussein blinking under the bright lights of infantry cameras, dazed to find himself in U.S. Army custody. Yet while the breaking news was broadcast around the world, the story of the...