For the New Yorker, Joshua Rothman explores why certain writers reach “long-term literary endurance” and others fall into obscurity. What he discovers is that long-term fame often has to do with…
Over at the New Yorker, Salman Rushdie looks back on an evening with Gunter Grass; they drank Schnapps, punked journalists, and had the best birthday party ever.
Poet, historian, and philosopher Jennifer Michael Hecht talks about Thomas Aquinas, Robin Williams, and her most recent book, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It.
In the past few weeks, two bloggers have been murdered in Bangladesh for writing critically about Islam. Reflecting on the deaths of Washiqur Rahman and Avijit Roy, George Packer argues…
Reviewing W. Joseph Campbell’s 1995: The Year the Future Began, Louis Menand explores, among other things, the different conceptions and strategies for recording history.
It’s a week of New York stories. First, in honor of St. Pat and maybe too those of us still a little rocked by the Daylight Savings shift, note should…
Amending Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Andrew Solomon offered advice to young writers at this year’s Whiting Writers’ Awards. An adaptation of the speech appears in the New Yorker.
The greatest problem for Sappho studies is that there’s so little Sappho to study. It would be hard to think of another poet whose status is so disproportionate to the…
In some piece or other, early on, I said of a person I was writing about that he had a “sincere” mustache. This brought Bingham, manuscript in hand, out of…