What can boxing teach us about the good life? Gordon Marino riffs on Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Camus, finding that in order to save our lives, we must risk loving.
Australian critic Clive James passed away last month. His writings show us that we need not choose between high and low culture: Dante matters, but so do the Doors.
Every crusade was both more and less than a religious war. No one had a monopoly on brutality, and economic motivations mattered as much as religious ones.
What is a home? And what happens when old patterns of life break down? British writer and former environmental activist Paul Kingsnorth grapples with these questions, and shares his responses.
As anyone who uses Facebook knows, we too quickly explain, meaning explain away, the world and each other. It’s not so simple; three books help complicate things.
Art. Fiction. Memoir. Even a graphic novel. Our critics compile a list of their favorite readings from 2019. They make great gift ideas for the Christmas season.
In recent decades, the institutions created to prevent corrupt dealings have themselves become complicit. Whistleblowers need protection, now more than ever.
Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez wanted to be known more for his journalistic prose than his novels. A new collection reveals the flaws of that desire.
Organized labor was once the backbone of American democracy. A new book argues that the future of collective bargaining requires adaptation to new economies.
Recent nonfiction increasingly takes ego as starting point. Jia Tolentino and Leslie Jamison use self-aware essays to examine popular culture and female experience.
Best known for his autobiographical and educational works, John Henry Newman now has the distinction of being the only saint with two published novels to his credit.
Global warming, the rise of the Latino vote, and, of course, millennial socialism. New books to keep an eye out for next time you browse the bookstore.
Available for the first time in English translation, the letters of a young German couple whose love of God and each other sustained them against Nazi oppression.
A new book proposes the abolition of life sentences. But meaningful criminal justice reform requires greater clarity about the nature and purpose of prison time.
I agree with the values of sacrifice and care, and I often find Briallen Hopper’s writing tenacious and lovely. So why did her book leave me not quite satisfied?
In spite of all the ambition and selfishness that New York supposedly represents, I’ve found that the city’s density has encouraged me to forget myself.
Edmund White knew that writers were most compelling when exploring a subject they were of two minds about: when they could see it from one angle, then another.
A journalists embeds himself among the rancher militia, led by Ammon Bundy, and faults the famous 2016 Oregon standoff for its warped concept of freedom
Matt Young’s retrospective look at his time as an enlisted Marine in an ongoing era of endless war is as darkly entertaining as it is crude and salacious
