On Annie Ernaux’s spectacular impersonalityDiscussed in this essay: A Girl’s Story, by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer. Seven Stories Press. 160 pages. $18.95. A Man’s Place, by Annie ...

Discussed in this essay: Collected Works, by Charles Portis. Library of America. 1,105 pages. $45. N ot long before Charles Portis visited Buckingham Palace in the summer of 1964, having secured a ...

The idea that literature contains multitudes is not new. For the greater part of its history, lit (t)eratura referred to any writing formed with letters. Up until the eighteenth century, the only true ...

T he foreclosure of New Communities did not stop the spread of CLTs, largely thanks to the efforts of Robert Swann, who had first brought the ideas of Henry George to Georgia. In 1972, Swann ...

Notes on humiliationT he first time I understood humiliation as world-destroying was the morning I watched the World Trade Center evaporate from a street corner in Greenwich Village and found myself ...

Discussed in this essay: The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle, edited by Saskia Hamilton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 560 pages. $50. The Dolphin: Two ...

N onetheless, it could use an update. Sometime around our tenth meeting, I tried to write one—a novel detailing the tumultuous history of my own unhappy romance. I wanted to explore the shape the ...

W hen I moved to New York City in 2008, my perception of safety (and everything else) was conditioned by a lifetime of American cop shows. Though I’d grown up in London and lived in neighborhoods with ...

Discussed in this essay: Warhol, by Blake Gopnik. Ecco. 976 pages. $45. One thing I miss is the time when America had big dreams about the future. Now it seems like nobody has big hopes for the future ...

Discussed in this essay: Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World, by Mary Beard. Liveright. 512 pages. $39.99. I f men think about the Roman Empire all the time, they do not do it under ...

How forests adapt to climate changeN inety minutes west of Boston, up the road from a Benedictine monastery, lies what is perhaps the most studied forest on Earth. Since 1907, when the first of these ...

It would be misleading to imply that Airless Spaces is a book about Firestone’s experiences with schizophrenia. Most of the stories are not about madness, per se—there’s very little mention of what ...