Sacred Duty
The Life of John Quincy Adams
All Reviews
The Act of Criticism and the Secular
A new body of literature is now challenging traditionally accepted views of the secularization.
Fortini and the Middle East
The Conscience of an Italian Jew
Michael Hastings Skewers Them From the Grave (with a Scoop of Gawker)
Point of view will always be there consciously or unconsciously — but if it’s there unconsciously, it gets feral and doesn’t serve your work.
I Go On: Michael North on Samuel Beckett’s “Echo’s Bones”
It is this sense of a life in which emptiness creates a kind of positive pressure, preventing its collapse, that makes “Echo’s Bones” prophetic of the great works that were to follow it.
The Squid Variations
Ryan Teitman on Matthew Gavin Frank, a book-length essay, poetry, the biography of a naturalist, and a giant squid.
Duane Allman, Skydog, Explained
Crossing the Border of Fiction
Kaya Genç on Teju Cole
The Resurrection of God in Cinema
S. Brent Plate parses a collection of essays on the reemergence of religion in European cinema.
Bobsession
We don’t choose our obsessions; our obsessions choose us. Nowhere is this truer than in the obsessive following Bob Dylan has amassed since his rise to fame in the early 1960s.
The Forgotten Charm of Iranian Storytelling
Dina Nayeri reviews Goli Taraghi’s book of short stories, The Pomegranate Lady and her Sons, and investigates the Westernization of successful Iranian literature, as well as the magic that permeates traditional Iranian storytelling.
House Rules
Stav Sherez on Richard House, the Booker Prize, and genre fiction.
A Liturgy of Absolution
Rick Perlstein’s "The Invisible Bridge"
Above Suspicion
Laurie L. Levenson reviews Lisa Bloom’s two-in-one book Suspicion Nation.
America Hates Women
Bad Feminist brings an inclusive and modulated voice to what has been, at times, a shrill conversation.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and American Militarism
The atomic bomb didn’t help win the war, and everybody knew it. The consequences plague us yet.