When Preachers Were Rock Stars: Louis Menand on 'Free Love: The Story of a Great American Scandal'
A classic New Yorker account of the Henry Ward Beecher adultery trial recalls a time in America that seems both incomprehensible and familiar.
A Life Lived with Intensity and Brilliance: Daniel Mendelsohn on Jane Ellen Harrison
Reminiscences of a Student’s Life focuses on the dazzling highlights of a life lived with intensity and brilliance: the chit-chat with crowned heads, the amusing, ever-so-slightly self-deprecating anecdotes that nonetheless sneakily illuminate either her independence of mind or her personal glamor, the intellectual enthusiasms, evoked with such memorable and even touching energy and candor.
Creditable, Surprising, Abundantly and Elegantly Good: Michael Hofmann on Duff Cooper's Only Novel
Duff Cooper (1890–1953): soldier, diplomat, parliamentarian, cabinet minister, man of letters. Also gambler, lover, and bon viveur. He came from a family flecked with elopements and illegitimacies, though also (“a dash of Hanoverian blood”) with ancestral ties to the British royal family . . . Duff Cooper was a product of Eton and New College, Oxford; a war hero, in what appears to have been a somewhat chaotic solitary action in the so-called “Battle of the Mist” on the Albert Canal, for which he received a DSO; and a celebrity husband as the successful wooer of a famous British beauty, Lady Diana Cooper, all by 1920.
When They Were Pretty: An Excerpt from ‘Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes’
“Heavens, Harriet,” Mrs. Klein said when Aunt Harry gave her the hot rum drink, “I need to send you to bartender’s school. Did you put any rum in it?”
A Lot of Pain and A Lot of Humor: Ottessa Moshfegh on Dinah Brooke’s ‘Lord Jim at Home’
"I didn’t care, and I didn’t worry, but I was suspended, consistently and dramatically, in the mirage of the novel.”
A Coiled Spring: An Excerpt from Mary Gaitskill's 'The Devil's Treasure'
Mary Gaitskill’s hybrid work ‘The Devil’s Treasure: A Book of Stories and Dreams,’ explores the connections between her life, work, and obsessions.
On Novocain: An Excerpt from Michael Clune’s ‘White Out’
From the foreword to White Out, to be republished by McNally Editions this month.
Excerpt: A Classic Novel of the Nazis’ Rise That Holds Lessons for Today
Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel “The Oppermanns,” newly reissued, raises salient questions about the relationship between art and politics.