Edenic Realism: On Éric Rohmer’s Élisabeth and His Literary Project

The initial pleasure of an Éric Rohmer film is the pleasure of a beautiful face. The initial response of any viewer is a dazed enchantment with his titillating aesthetics. The faces, yes, but also the French landscape and the youthful, lithe bodies that populate it. Despite its name, even Rohmer’s A Tale of Winter begins with tones of blush pink and sparkling summer azure. A seagull flies overhead to the dulcet notes of a piano. A couple lounges on a beach in nude, edenic delight.

Revolutionary Blues: On the Novels of Hari Kunzru

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. Ballard novels in The War Against Cliché; Alan Hollinghurst’s insightful review of Bryan Washington’s first novel Memorial and Washington’s excellent collection of interconnected short stories, Lot; or Rachel Kushner’s paean to Denis Johnson in The Hard Crowd.

STARGAZER: OR, GRAIL QUEST IN THE OUTER HEBRIDES

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 Scotland, on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, and that she wanted to fly me out and feed and house me for two weeks over the summer solstice.

Gore Vidal’s Strange, Eventful United States: On a Curious American Master

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 central characters) for a program they’re making (about Roosevelt, Truman, and the arming of America in the 20th century).

Misreading the Past to Chart the Future: On Remake Literature

The artists are at a dinner party gossiping about a dead woman. They say it was an overdose. Her mother doubts whether it was a suicide, but the unnamed narrator of Zoe Dubno’s Happiness and Love (2025) never questions it. Rebecca, a failed actress, had been a fixture in the art scene of Dimes Square, the Lower East Side neighborhood where the novel takes place. She acted in small plays, but she never made it onto the big screen like the Old Hollywood actresses she idolized.

The Galactic Triumph of the New York Knicks: On an Improbable Basketball Run

It all started with an unexpected late-night phone call delivering some much-needed good news. I was coming back from visiting my dad, who was fresh off a debilitating car accident that cost him five broken bones and a sternum in the process. Luckily, despite the laborious rehab, he was quickly en route to a full recovery, but I was still desperate for a pick-me-up, and that’s just what came.

Now Watch This Drive: On the Letters of John Updike

We find this passage in a letter written by John Updike to his girlfriend Mary Entwistle Pennington on April 1st, 1952, sent from the farmhouse he was visiting in Plowville, Pennsylvania, where he had lived with his parents and maternal grandparents during high school before he went off to Harvard where he would meet Mary, a Radcliffe student, in a course on medieval sculpture. They would be engaged by the end of the year, with just over 20 years of marriage and four children ahead of them.

Sincerity Run Amok: On Ocean Vuong, Kaveh Akbar, and the Misguided War on Cynicism

It’s perhaps not surprising that American poetry’s A-listers have come, of late, to espouse sincerity as both writing practice and a way of discoursing about writing. Plenty of developments seemed to clear a path for this new wave of earnestness. There was Marc Kelly Smith, arguably the first “slam” poet; the proliferation of spoken word, or “performance” poetry; and the subsequent transformation of the open mic into the gestic, roaring soapbox that it is today. There was, beginning in 1996, National Poetry Month, which drew inspiration from Black History Month and Women’s History Month.

Melancholy Is a Duty We Ignore: On Edmund White

I always imagined I would write something about Edmund White after his death. What I never imagined was the death itself. It came on the evening of June 3, 2025. I found out the morning after, lying in bed. I had slept in; I was startled and squinted into the indirect sunlight just past my bedroom doors as I heard my wife say, “He died.” I didn’t know whom she meant, nor why he should be important enough to wake me; I assumed she was talking about some actor, musician, or statesman whose obituary she’d read in the paper. “Who?” I asked.

Life of Intrigue: On Fathers, Paperbacks, and Unsolvable Mysteries

The news came by text from my older sister. Just had a policeman at the door. Dad died. Found deceased in his apt. No other details yet. I was grocery shopping with my daughter, and she was growing impatient, squirming in her stroller. I quickly wrote back: Thanks for letting me know. Call you later. I tried calling my sister that night, but she didn’t answer. I didn’t call again. My father’s death didn’t come as a shock. Months before, he’d been hospitalized for respiratory failure, his lungs ravaged from decades of smoking, his cirrhotic liver barely functioning. He’d pulled through that time, but by all reports, just barely.

Spirit of America: On Don DeLillo and Ghost Language

The 20th century variously imagined the end of history: rapture, communism, the triumph of neoliberalism. For the people of the Lamb of God, it was a gust of wind and words. Partly because far-away Jews had recently reclaimed the city of Jerusalem and partly because of our own faithfulness, we believed we were witnessing the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Heaven was “inbreaking,” and before long, it would fully sweep the earth.

The Very Good Soldier: On the American Journey of Bret Easton Ellis

A portrait of the artist in 1986 finds him at Woods Gramercy, an upscale restaurant in what the New York Times is calling “the year of the column in restaurant decoration,” and it’s just about the only restaurant right now that’s trying to make a name for itself with vegetables, of all things; in fact the “Steamed Vegetables” is among the most talked-about dishes on its menu and the most affordable (always a good sign) . . .

God Is in the Algorithm: On NBA YoungBoy, the Hidden American Superstar

One hundred and nine million albums sold. Fifteen billion YouTube streams. One hundred Billboard charting singles. One hundred and twenty-six RIAA certified platinum songs. Thirty-four Billboard charting albums. Surely, we’re discussing Taylor Swift here, right? Beyoncé, perhaps? Drake? Prince? The Eagles? Mariah Carey? The Beatles? Possibly even Michael Jackson? What if I told you it was none of the above?

Hard and Soft at Once: On Eva Illouz and Fifty Shades of Grey

The key question posed by Fifty Shades of Grey, as sociologist Eva Illouz recognizes in her brilliant 2014 book on the topic, Hard-Core Romance: “Fifty Shades of Grey,” Best-Sellers, and Society, isn’t why a poorly written BSDM romance novel would capture the imagination of millions of women. Poorly written and slightly rapey romance novels have been firing the erotic imaginations of millions of women in the book-buying West for more than a century, ever since the romance genre became a mass market phenomenon.

Theater Without Actors: On the Haunted State of “Immersive” Theater

My feet are bare and so are my companions’. We are walking over cool deep-pile carpet and what feels like rough forest floor as we travel through Viola’s Room, an immersive experience created by London’s Punchdrunk collective, which recently wrapped up a five-month run at Manhattan’s arts complex The Shed. We are a group of six. We walk through corridors accompanied by the gloriously round vowels of actor Helena Bonham Carter, who speaks into each of our noise-canceling headphones. Her voice tells an odd fairy tale. We enter and exit a series of rooms. Beautiful rooms . . . empty rooms.