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5 Books That Prove Mark Twain Is the Sharpest Satirist in American Literature
5 Books That Prove Mark Twain Is the Sharpest Satirist in American Literature
Mark Twain wrote as if he were always one eye ahead of the crowd. He could be uproarious and wise, homespun and ruthless, sentimental and deeply skeptical—all in the same... Read more...
Salman Rushdie The Satanic Verses
The Book That Shook the World
When The Satanic Verses became an international political event On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie walked onto a stage in Chautauqua, New York, to give a lecture... Read more...
Lost in Translation
Lost in Translation
Why translated literature remains marginalized in America Walk into almost any American bookstore and you'll find shelves that seem to span the globe—covers evoking Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Warsaw, Lagos. Look... Read more...
The Constitution
America at 250: Tested, Not Trumped
America turns 250 today, but the mood is not very celebratory. The Trump administration has not honored the Constitution so much as pushed against it. That shows how fragile American... Read more...
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann and the Seductions of Decadence
He was the high priest of European culture who chronicled its decline with such elegance that the end often looked more beautiful than the beginning. In 1933, Thomas Mann was... Read more...
Gideon Levy
Gideon Levy: The Man Who Won’t Let the Occupation Be Occupied Territory
He was supposed to cover “the territories.” Somewhere along the way, the territories started covering him. Every week, while most Israelis encountered the West Bank through security briefings and blurred... Read more...
Penguin Books
The Sixpence That Changed Publishing Forever
In 1935, a man stood on an English railway platform with nothing to read. The newsstand offered the usual fare: newspapers, magazines, pulp. Good books existed, but they were expensive,... Read more...
James Joyce with his publisher Sylvia Beach in her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, in Paris, 1922.
The Book That Had to Go on Trial
How Ulysses transformed censorship law and redefined what publishers could print In December 1933, a federal judge in New York was asked to rule on a question that courts had... Read more...
Fernando Pessoa and the Crowd in His Head
Fernando Pessoa and the Crowd in His Head
He made inner confusion sound orderly, and in doing so made ordinary life feel metaphysically unstable. In Lisbon in the early decades of the 20th century, a bespectacled office worker... Read more...
Israel Palestine
The Skeptic Who Stopped Asking: Sam Harris and the Seduction of Moral Certainty
In response to Sam Harris's recent Substack essay, "Why I Won't Debate Critics of Israel" On September 16, 1982, residents of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila woke... Read more...
Why Bookstores Get to Send Books Back
Why Bookstores Get to Send Books Back
Picture a clothing shop sending unsold sweaters back to the manufacturer months later for a full refund. Or a supermarket returning stale cereal for cash. No retailer gets that deal,... Read more...
Saul Bellow
Bellow at Full Volume
He was the novelist who gave voice to the modern mind at full volume—neurotic, erudite, self-lacerating, and insistently alive. Saul Bellow carved a singular path through 20th-century American fiction. While... Read more...