by The Editors
January 27, 2025
We are a quarter of the way through the new century, and the state of high culture is not what it should be. Individuals are no less brilliant, but there is a clear institutional lack. It’s as if the great publishers, film producers, and record labels can no longer provide us the artistic nourishment that…
August 14, 2026
For some of us avid readers, the joy of reading novels is nearly matched by the pleasure of recommending them to our most simpatico friends. Thoughtful criticism can play this role writ large. I can still remember the reviewers who first stimulated my interest in particular authors: Martin Amis’ collected reviews of various J. G….
August 12, 2026
AT THE END OF MARCH, I was sitting at a departure gate at JFK, having endured a brutal frigid winter exiled upstate in a yurt in the woods, about to fly to Tokyo to bury my maternal grandmother, when I got a strange and unusual email. From a woman, Kirstie, who said she lived in…
by Ross Barkan
August 11, 2026
What is the state of American literature today? This loaded question never has an easy answer, and invariably the debate grows tedious, ideological and sociological combatants racing to their predictable corners, fists wearily raised. In my years as a novelist and columnist and now editor-in-chief of this publication, I’ve come to believe that large, conglomerate…
by Adam Straus
August 8, 2026
SUPER SOLDIER was not well received initially, the main issue being we were Marines and proud of that fact. Soldier was a pejorative; anyone calling us soldiers was either clueless as to the distinctions between the Marine Corps (small, lethal, aggressive) and the Army (large, bloated, soft), or messing with us. So when a huge…
August 7, 2026
A series of minor events — a dinner party, a holiday in La Spezia, a poorly attended funeral — make up two years in the middling lives of a middle-aged, middle-class set of London friends, retold through different perspectives over the six chapters of Will Self’s The Quantity Theory of Morality.
August 6, 2026
When Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa died at 89 in Lima in 2025, many Latin American commentators in mainstream and social media struck a similar note: he was a great writer despite his political views. Vargas Llosa was a forceful and outspoken classical liberal, pro-Western and pro-market.
by Jason Baker
August 2, 2026
Between her forefinger and thumb / my grandmother holds a needle threader— / a loop of wire on a tin coin / stamped with a lady’s cameo / so thin it must be valuable, the way / a dime is worth more than a nickel / She’d smudge her things with nail polish / to…
by Sam Jennings
July 29, 2026
There is a scene, early in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 masterpiece Le Mépris, that surely contains the ultimate cinematic statement on Homer’s Odyssey. An American producer has asked the film’s screenwriter protagonist to help rewrite an adaptation of The Odyssey helmed by the great German director Fritz Lang (playing himself, beautifully). The writer comes to meet Lang in the studio…
July 28, 2026
Where to begin? At the end. At the close of The Golden Age, the last novel in his long series of American history, Gore Vidal performs a theatrical trick. The year is 2000. A television crew has come from Rome to Ravello in order to interview Vidal (the writer) alongside Peter Sanford (one of the writer’s…