The Big Smoke
The beach, a scintillating embodiment of the California Dream just hours earlier, now looked more like the landing pad for Charon, the ferryman of Hades, with...
Dems Must Play Offense
To the Editors: Joseph O’Neill’s two excellent essays on contemporary American politics should be essential reading by every Democratic candidate as well as the advisers and...
Conquest and Agency
To the Editors: I applaud both Jeffrey Ostler’s fine book Surviving Genocide and Peter Nabokov’s insightful review of it. Framing Ostler’s work as reflective of contemporary...
Simulating Democracy
Jill Lepore is a brilliant and prolific historian with an eye for unusual and revealing stories, and her new book If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation...
Confinement and Contagion
The coronavirus has made those in women’s prisons still more vulnerable. “The world at large has forgotten us,” one woman wrote from Texas. “We are the...
An ‘Invaluable’ Source
To the Editors: Zadie Smith’s interesting review of the artwork of Kara Walker contains a large section on the life and diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, a...
By Telling New Stories, We Build a New Future
In order to fit more texts into my Asian American literature course, I sometimes assign the play adaptation of Jessica Hagedorn’s novel Dogeaters. The novel is...
Introducing the 2020 National Book Award Longlists!
It’s awards season! Those of you who love book prizes and reading lists (a group that includes me) have a LOT to geek out about. Earlier...
