Literature

Biography & Memoir

Finding the Story

Running a nonfiction workshop in prison for three months, I saw how writing could let my peers forge a new identity. Then it came to an end.

May 21, 2025

Maurice Samuels

Proust’s Jewish Question

The debate over Proust’s relation to his Jewish identity ultimately turns not just on his personal attachments but on how he represents Jewish characters in his novel.

June 26, 2025 issue

Alice Kaplan

Zionism Without Zion

Rachel Cockerell’s family saga shows that in the search for a Jewish homeland, Palestine was only one possible location.

May 29, 2025 issue

Colin Thubron

The Haven of Wilderness

In a quartet of books about life in the mountains of southern Bulgaria and North Macedonia as they descend into Greece, Kapka Kassabova gives voice to the shepherds, nomads, horse breeders, dog breeders, villagers, and refugees who live there.

June 12, 2025 issue

Francine Prose

Poisoning the Family Tree

Joe Dunthorne’s Children of Radium is an account of his search for information about his great-grandfather, a German Jewish scientist who helped develop chemical weapons for the Nazis.

April 24, 2025 issue

Jacob Weisberg

The Lucky One

Who was the “real” Reagan behind the carapace of vagueness, self-delusion, and contradiction?

March 27, 2025 issue

Vivian Gornick

The 176-Year Argument

At the University of Chicago all they wanted to know was, What’s the theory? At Yale all they wanted to know was, What’s the technique? At City College of New York all they wanted to know was, How does this relate to real life?

April 24, 2025 issue

Sarah Haque

In Search of Almas Ali

My grandfather was an early activist in the struggle for a free Bangladesh. Why was he killed by the independence movement he helped found?

May 4, 2025

Great Lives

Marie-Antoinette; unfinished portrait by Alexander Kucharsky, 1791–1792

Lynn Hunt

Marie Antoinette: Why Was She So Hated?

How Marie Antoinette tried to save the monarchy.

November 5, 2020 issue

Fintan O’Toole

A Moral Witness

Martha Gellhorn’s letters to her lovers and intimate friends involve a remarkable feat of reportage on the war within Gellhorn herself

October 8, 2020 issue

Michael Gorra

Young Woman from the Provinces

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work

February 27, 2020 issue

The Latest

Andrew Delbanco

The Connoisseur of Desire

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great theme of erotic anticipation is never more alive than in the longings of Jay Gatsby.

May 29, 2025 issue

Madeleine Thien

Killing Memories

The Chinese writer Fang Fang’s novel Soft Burial probes traumatic national memories across several generations, even as her Covid diary in 2020 made her the target of a relentless disinformation campaign in China.

May 15, 2025 issue

Thomas Powers

A Mighty Theme

Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is “the Moby-Dick of the plains”—the great book about the American West.

April 24, 2025 issue

Benjamin Nathans

The Enigma of George Kennan

Frank Costigliola’s biography of George Kennan explores the contrast between the supreme confidence of his policy prescriptions and the perpetual turbulence of his inner life.

April 24, 2025 issue

Cathleen Schine

Ungovernable, Capricious Life

In Hanif Kureishi’s astonishing memoir of his life after the fall that left him tetraplegic, the sense of vulnerability is crushing, but it’s also part of what makes the writing so intimate.

April 10, 2025 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Living Wide

Foster Hirsch’s Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties is an implicit memoir, revisiting his experience of a staggering array of films and the world in which they emerged.

April 10, 2025 issue

Colm Tóibín

‘Her Own Woman’

In Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy created herself on the page—and then reimagined the self she had established.

March 13, 2025

Jed Perl

Echoes of Eternity

The critic Arlene Croce found in classical ballet timeless values in a timely form, but she looked to modern dance for the reverse: timely values taking on a timeless form.

March 27, 2025 issue