Spanning almost James Agee’s entire lifetime, these letters between author and his priest cover alcohol, God, poetry, childhood, and a “mouthful of sweet potato.”
Set on present day Staten Island Eddie Joyce’s ‘Small Mercies’ traces the effect of 9/11 on the families of people living in “the servants’ quarters of New York.”
Frank Bruni challenges elitist assumptions about what “counts” as a worthy education, and Fareed Zakaria defends the usefulness and versatility of the liberal arts.
Celan’s work has prompted an often reverential critical response. But his poetry is always difficult and sometimes agonizing; reading it provides no easy pleasures.
Narrated by the nameless victim’s brother, Kamal Daoud’s novel asks: Did Camus intend to use the Algerian murder victim in ‘The Stranger’ as a disposable prop?
Chen Guangcheng’s condemnation of the Chinese state is told through his story of legal activism, resulting torture, trial, house arrest, and an escape to the U.S.
Biographer Randy Boyagoda paints Richard John Neuhaus as an unusually ambitious and politically engaged priest as public intellectual—but is his narrative too tidy?
Claudia Rankine’s ‘Citizen’ and Jeffery Renard Allen’s ‘Song of the Shank’ both take up the issue of race in America in jagged and beautiful poetry and prose.
Readers write in on how academic, humanistic, and prophetic cultures should be balanced, when kids should be confirmed, and why nothing’s better than the Eucharist.
Laura Swan does a good job of explaining both the beguines’ spiritual practices in the context of their own times and how their continuing legacy affects us today.
Brooks thinks character is what’s missing in our self-centered society, yet has written a self-help book for an age he believes values the self much too highly.
Even if her new novel gives us pleasure, shouldn’t we be able to remember Harper Lee as a member of one of the most unusual groupings in literary history?
Anne Enright’s new novel suggests something simple—family, for good or ill, keeps forming us even when we try to escape it—but her prose constantly surprises.
In her new book, Jane Maienschein lays out the history of embryonic science—going back to Aristotle—hoping to answer an old question: When does a human life begin?
Paul Moses’s history of Irish-Italian relations in 19th century New York delves into the causes for “race war” between the immigrant groups and how they overcame it.
Langdon Hammer’s biography of poet and writer James Merrill is “wholly definitive” in scope, and threaded throughout with Merrill’s brilliant, always enlivening wit.
If you ask me, being a writer is a little like falling in love. No matter how uncomplicated it seems at the start, it is always complicated. The trick is to persist.
Ireland’s fiction laureate talks about sex and death in Ireland; Pope John Paul II’s 1979 visit to the country; Kafka and kids; and her new novel, ‘The Green Road.’
The pattern of income inequality is more than a social problem, Robert Putnam says; it’s a social tragedy, most devastating in the lives of poor American children.
Many modern American thinkers have asked, often and with anxiety, “What is man?” In his latest book, Mark Greif thinks we’ve outgrown this—and it’s a good thing.
In his final book, the late Peter Gay expands familiar notion of the Romantic rebellion against Enlightenment rationality, to the focus on artistic self-expression.
Readers “angered at the tortured logic of the editors” respond to the removal of Bishop Finn, Francis’s failures, the value of “big history,” and how to know Jesus.
Andrew Cockburn’s ‘Kill Chain’ examines the disastrous political effects of the U.S. military’s targeted assassination practices--and the true motives behind them.
Unlike past Eurocentric taxonomies of world religions, the latest Norton anthology aims to let six major, living, international religions speak...in their own words.
Iranian author Azar Nafiri defends the value of canonical American literature—its imagination and humanity—against Common Core, market analyses, and Babbitt.
The award-winning author of the story collection ‘Night at the Fiestas’ talks about her influences, the importance of empathy in fiction, and washing altar cloths.
Charles Camosy believes we are “on the verge of a new moment in the abortion debate,” politically capable of compromise. But has he misunderstood Catholic teaching?
Pinckney’s short history deals with basic things—Reconstruction, Ku Klux Klan terrorism, crude political machinations like Plessy v Ferguson—white people can forget.
The pro-British kings archeologist-turned-spy-turned-colonel T.E. Lawrence helped establish in Arabia, Iraq, and Transjordan made “Arab unity” a “madman’s notion.”
Is humanity better or worse off believing in the sacred? Kitcher has not provided new reasons for declaring the death of God, but he certainly makes it seem foolish.
It might be tempting to call D’Ambrosio’s essays confessions. But he rejects that label. The self of his essays is “more like a perspective, an angle of vision...”
William Deresiewicz not only critiques the idea that college education is about learning marketable skills; he also revives the quest for meaning, self, and soul.
This integrative, enjoyable “book for beginners” still may hold surprises for scholars: nuns absolving sins, petitioners humiliating saints, a woman pope, and more.
Mailer, Trilling, Macdonald, Kazin, Maxwell, Bellow, Auden, O’Hara—men with public moral concerns, who seized power to shape American literature. But who were they?
