Rage, Muse

The novels that revisit Greek myths, giving voice to the women who were scorned, wronged, or forgotten

Martha Foley’s Granddaughters

What the esteemed literary editor never knew about the life of her troubled son, David Burnett

To Catch a Sunset

Reflections on allergies, anxieties, and the limits of familial love

The Next New Thing

In architecture, the gulf between the traditional and the modern seems wider than ever before

Imperfecta

Her brother’s disease leads a writer to challenge how we conceive of human abnormality in the emerging era of gene editing

The Widower’s Lament
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After the death of the poet Wendy Barker, her grieving husband turns to the literature of loss

The World at the End of a Line

The grandson of one of American literature’s Lost Generation novelists reflects on his namesake’s love of the sea

The Goddess Complex

A set of revered stone deities was stolen from a temple in northwestern India; their story can tell us much about our current reckoning with antiquities trafficking

Last Rites and Comic Flights

A funeral in a 1984 Japanese film offers moments of slapstick amid the solemnity

The Believer

When nobody would touch Joyce’s manuscript, Sylvia Beach stepped in

The Bearable Lightness of Being

If you live long enough and contentedly enough in exile, your feelings of estrangement can evolve into a sense of living two lives at once

Solitude and Leadership

If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts

Reading in a Digital Age

Notes on why the novel and the Internet are opposites, and why the latter both undermines the former and makes it more necessary

Nabokov Lives On

Why his unfinished novel, Laura, deserved to be published; what’s left in the voluminous archive of his unpublished work

They Get to Me

A young psycholinguist confesses her strong attraction to pronouns

When the Light Goes On

How a great teacher can bring a receptive mind to life

To Die of Having Lived

A neurological surgeon reflects on what patients and their families should and should not do when the end draws near

My Brain on My Mind

The ABCs of the thrumming, plastic mystery that allows us to think, feel, and remember

The Stolen Election

An expatriate Iranian writer travels her troubled homeland in the weeks after a disputed presidential vote

Seventy Years Later

The Second World War destroyed Adolf Hitler, but his legacy is showing disturbing signs of life

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