Éric Vuillard Is Rewriting the Writing of History
Vuillard doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that his quest for murky truths sometimes forces him to speculate.
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The Novels Behind This Year’s Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar Noms
Three of this year's contenders are literary adaptions. How do they hold up to their source material? And which will win?
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The Industrial Visions of Precisionist Art
Industrial structures were the cathedrals of the machine age.
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Is It So Wrong to Accessorize with Books?
Ashley Tisdale and Dior and Gigi remind us of books’ outsize power to shape our perceptions of their owners.
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Those Who Left Us: Literary Obits of 2021
This highly selective list of literary lights that were extinguished during the past year ranges from brand names to barely-knowns.
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A Year in Reading: Bill Morris
My purest reading pleasure of the year was my first stab at the work of Percival Everett, the gifted, prolific, genre-bending author of some 30 works of fiction.
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Goodbye, Rush Limbaugh, and Good Riddance
If he accomplished nothing else in his outlandish lifetime, Limbaugh revealed the bankruptcy, hypocrisy, and outright cruelty burning in the heart of every right-wing moralist.
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Those Who Left Us: Select Literary Obits From 2020
This was, after all, the year when everything stopped making sense.
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A Year in Reading: Bill Morris
This was the year I finally, belatedly, decided to figure out why people make such a fuss about Joy Williams.
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On the Oldest Road: U.S. 1, Robert Kramer, the Buick, and Me
The highway is a monument to the American lust for the hideous, the delight in ugliness for its own sake.
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Correcting History: On C Pam Zhang’s ‘How Much of These Hills Is Gold’
We need many more novels like this one: novels that breathe life into people who have gone unseen too long.
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Kent Russell’s Long March
Russell's new book is sure to make readers foam all over again. Not because it’s a bad book, but because it is wildly uneven—with flashes of brilliance bogged down by half-baked analysis and muddy writing.
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Please! Hold Off on That Novel Coronavirus Novel!
Many people liken quarantine to prison or war, yet there are salutary rewards to be found in such solitary activities as braiding your own hair, learning to play piano, watching birds, and photographing your daughters.
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Does Robert Towne’s ‘Chinatown’ Oscar Need an Asterisk?
Why didn’t Edward Taylor insist on a screenwriting credit, and the money that would flow with it? As his stepdaughter implored him, “What are you doing? You can’t not get credit. It’s not fair and it’s not accurate.”
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Those Who Left Us: Select Literary Obituaries of 2019
Death didn’t discriminate in 2019—it took down the acclaimed, the obscure, and a little bit of everything in between.
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A Year in Reading: Bill Morris
I grew suspicious Isenberg was writing a cleverly coded takedown of Trump, but I realized that was unlikely because the book was published five months before the 2016 election.
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The Private Life of Debbie Harry
Sometimes it was almost deliciously scary [to] be fighting against these odds. The reward of having a creative enterprise be accepted is kind of amazing.
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