Bending the Arc of History
A new biography of Howard Zinn functions less as a detailed portrait of a man than as an inspirational manual for contemporary endurance.
Biography & Autobiography
"I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead." — Samuel Goldwyn
Character Study
The burgeoning field of fiction character biographies.
Saint Alito
Mollie Hemingway offers up an uncritical biography of Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court’s most conservative jurist.
The Estranged Worlds of J. G. Ballard
An incisive and moving new critical biography of one of the nuclear age’s greatest visionaries.
Cape Neurotic
Remembering the friendship and legacy of Irish writer Dermot Healy.
The Deadline Dickens
A new biography of Garry Trudeau offers a wealth of detail but fails to come to grips with the limits of his comic strip’s satire.
Disappearing Scrapbooks
The fate of Willa Cather’s archives, real and fictional.
Friendship as a Way of Life
Art, love, and a dense web of friendships in a double biography and richly textured history of Downtown Manhattan from the 1960s to the ’80s.
Long Live Poetry
Three new books by and about Romanian poet Paul Celan demonstrate that he was a problematic figure in many ways.
A Better World Is Not Possible
Did the Weather Underground have a point?
Maybe the World Will Muddle Through Somehow
AI overlord Demis Hassabis is the anti–Sam Altman. Does it matter?
Being Eugène Atget
The new exhibition of Eugène Atget’s photography demands what we are getting worse at giving: time, stillness, and the willingness to see.
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