A Biographer Looks Back

A noted practitioner reveals her tricks of the trade

Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me by Deirdre Bair

University of Virginia

A Founding Class

Two new studies of the man from Monticello

Thomas Jefferson’s Education by Alan Taylor Revolutionary Brothers by Tom Chaffin

Elizabeth Bishop and Louise Crane

Questions of Inspiration

Should we try to see the poet in her poetry?

Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop by Thomas Travisano

Lydia Davis

The Barber of Language

A new collection from a celebrated prose stylist

Essays One by Lydia Davis

Van Cliburn performing

Nationalist Anthems

Remembering a time when composers mattered more

Dangerous Melodies by Jonathan Rosenberg

whale

Pursuing the White Whale

A briny exploration of Melville’s greatest work

Ahab’s Rolling Sea: A Natural History of Moby-Dick by Richard J. King

Cross

Too Long Ignored

An engaging look at the forces that shaped history south of the border

Silver, Sword & Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story by Marie Arana

Photo of Oliver Sacks

Head Cases

Field notes on a beautiful friendship

And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? A Biographical Memoir of Oliver Sacks by Lawrence Weschler

Etching of 1857 Art Treasures Exhibition in Manchester

The Great Convergence

How continental art and literature went global

The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture by Orlando Figes

Black and white photo of Susan Sontag

Image Is Not Everything

A definitive portrait of a celebrated American intellectual

Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser

Aging Out

Many of us do not go gentle into that good night

Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Ageby James Chappel

Old Christ Church in Alexandria. Virginia, attended by General Robert E. Lee in his youth and pictured here in 1911 (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign/Wikimedia Commons)

Divided Providence

Faith’s pivotal role in the outcome of the Civil War

Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Unionby Richard Carwardine

Ideology as Anatomy

How shifting ideas about women’s bodies have affected their lives

Immaculate Forms: A History of the Female Body in Four Partsby Helen King

Island Royalty

A new biography of a Caribbean revolutionary

The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christopheby Marlene L. Daut

The Creator’s Code

Are humans alone in their ability to make art?

The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines From Automata to AIby David Hajdu

All Talk

Ease of communication will not save us

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apartby Nicholas Carr

Barbarity at the Bataclan

A chilling account of darkness in the City of Light

V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrère, translated from the Frenchby John Lambert

Heart of Semi-Darkness

A writer’s delectable quest for rare flavors

Masters of Horror and Magic

The German folklorists who helped build a nation

For Want of Touch

The astonishing breadth of our passions

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