March 2019

In my early twenties, along with an obsessive but largely un-acted-upon desire to become a writer, I was afflicted by an enduring physical malaise. It is hard now for me to separate these two dominant features of my life at that time

I was 25 when I first set foot in Britain in 1995, incidentally the same year Bill Bryson published his bestselling travelogue Notes from a Small Island. Voted by BBC Radio 4 listeners...

The war in Afghanistan is now in its seventeenth year and, despite recent attempts to broker a lasting peace, the fight against the Taliban keeps dragging on.

In London’s bustling Soho neighborhood, A.N. Devers’s feminist paradise for bibliophiles is thriving—and changing the way collectors think about the literary canon.

At the risk of leaving in a car for dinner in the city and ending up in Rome, the next day, after having rolled all night, because of a change of mind.

Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 best-selling novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, containing as it does all of the stereotypical accoutrement of its gothic genre, from perfidious Italian counts to dark castles...

A few weeks ago, a six-thousand-word article in Esquire on the unexceptional life of a white teen-ager in peri-urban Wisconsin generated a furious online backlash.

My mother cleaned and gardened with a passion I often mistook for rage. After my father left, when I was four, she washed the windows of our three-bedroom house—and the floors, walls, and ceilings—by hand, twice.

Here’s the question everyone else keeps asking themselves (ourselves), and each other, and, I suppose, in the case of certain reporters who dare to engage them directly, the actual people under consideration: Why, regardless, of what he does, do they keep supporting this man?

An essential fact about the Hebrew Bible is that most of its narrative prose as well as its poetry manifests a high order of sophisticated literary fashioning.

In at least one instance, a book by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano may have saved a life.

In the late ’90s and early aughts, the word woke was a life vest. My parents and the other black people I grew up with used it to stay afloat in a Wisconsin town whose university once feigned diversity by photoshopping a black man onto the cover of an...

Under the pen name “L.E.L.,” Letitia Elizabeth Landon had been one of the most famous literary women of her brief pre-Victorian moment, her poetry a staple of the popular literary press for well over a decade.

I’m not arguing that centre-right and right-wing critics of antisemitism are antisemitic, but their campaign has a ferocious hygiene about it that carries unpleasant and ironic resonances...