I do not apologize
when I'm provoked.
You lit the match.
Now eat the fire.
Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s posthumous “Nobody’s Girl” doesn’t break political news, but might break your heart.
My entire future rested on a few essays written in the school hall under a three-hour time constraint? Really? In the nineties, this was what we called “the meritocracy.” - The New Yorker
The relationships between writers and publisherscan be as long-lasting and as complicated as any marriage. Consider Gustave Flaubert and Michel Lévy... more »
Rambling man. Peter Matthiessen travelled to places most writers would never dare to go. What was he running from — or to?... more »
More than 300 years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying. The result: We're dumber, less creative, and less free ... more »
Facing a likely ban at home, the first Slovak novelwas approved by royal censors in Vienna and published by a German printer... more »
Sylvia Plath and the "slicks." Her apprenticeship was shaped by a determination — and the financial need — to appear in women's magazines... more »
The “idiot savant” was a rare curio — genius in one context, helpless in others. The discourse has evolved, but the fascination remains... more »
Starbucks never changes, but rivers dry up and democracies collapse. The world we inhabit would be utterly bizarre to our agrarian ancestors... more »
James Schuyler didn't sound like other mad poets of his era. His style wasn't frenetic. But that doesn't mean madness didn't alter his sensibility... more »
A new emphasis on sobriety and moderation renders foreign F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “alcoholic mist” and “lush and liquid garden parties”... more »
Who will win this year’s Nobel Prize in literature? Bookmakers are favoring Can Xue and László Krasznahorkai... more »
Before he was a bearded celebrity, a Great Man, young Tennyson was gauche, beautiful, ringed by tobacco smoke, and far more interesting... more »
With CRISPR, it turns out that playing God is neither difficult nor expensive. But should we harness this incredible technology?... more »
An unprecedented grand tour of bibliophilic crime: 170 rare Russian books, valued at more than $3 million, gone... more »
Goethe’s philosophical coordinates came initially from Rousseau and Spinoza, two thinkers who appealed to and fortified his own disposition... more »
Ann Goldstein and the art of translation: "The goal is to make a writer sound as much like him or herself as possible. Not like you"... more »
The book business may be centered in New York, but when it comes to advances for debut authors, the attitude is pure Las Vegas... more »
In 1486, Giovanni Pico was young, handsome, rich, and on his way to Rome to dazzle theologians and the Pope. It didn’t go well... more »
For a decade, Francis Fukuyama has been trying to explain the rise of global populism. Now he has an answer... more »
One of Kafka’s great themes is paradox. Here’s one: His work defies translation, yet it has attracted very ambitious, talented translators ... more »
Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber says academia must listen to its critics. So why isn’t he taking his own advice?... more »
While many of Gertrude Stein’s books are modern classics, some are ignored as too avant-garde. It’s time to rediscover them... more »
The dodo, the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger: One company believes it can bring them back, making animal extinction a thing of the past... more »
The history of vanilla — the world’s favorite flavor — is rife with counterfeiting, pilfering, piracy, smuggling, and account fraud... more »
In 1956, Gore Vidal declared: “I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag”... more »
Rachel Ruysch’s reputation once rivalled Rembrant’s. Now, due to snobbery and sexism, her paintings are compared with wallpaper... more »
An instant classic that has endured for seven centuries, the history of the reception of Dante’s Divine Comedy is a history of Western taste... more »
Many writers find writing agonizing. Few have expressed that feeling as vividly as Cynthia Ozick... more »
Biographers have been likened to fiction writers and professional burglars. Richard Holmes takes a different view... more »
Know your meme. In the early 2000s, technology, art, and amateurism combined to reach such cultural achievements as LOLcats... more »
Mary Carleton, the “German Princess,” charged with bigamy and theft, was a sensation in 1660s London. More than 500 people visited her in jail... more »
