Books & Ideas

The Mirror

Imagining justice in Palestine.

  • Elias Khoury

We Laughed, We Cried

Flann O’Brien’s triumph.

  • Roger Boylan

Justify the Enemy

Becoming human in South Africa.

  • Zakes Mda

The Best of All Games

Philosopher John Rawls on the delights of baseball.

  • John Rawls

The Monarch of All

The fantasy world of John Cowper Powys.

  • Roger Boylan

For Love and Money

A review of A Free Life, by Ha Jin.

  • Mythili G. Rao

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All That Is Given

Hannah Arendt on being Jewish.

  • Vivian Gornick

Something for Myself

Haruki Murakami’s strange world of hope.

  • Catalina Holguín

The Curse of Modernity

Philip Rieff’s problem with freedom.

  • George Scialabba

Whole Sight

On artistic passion.

  • Charles Johnson

Nabokov’s Gift

A writer's legacy.

  • Roger Boylan

Found in Translation

On César Aira, Roberto Bolaño, and Hispanic-American writing.

  • Aura Estrada

The Reckoning

On the proper place for religion in politics.

  • Catherine Tumber

Knowing Right and Wrong

Is Morality a Natural Phenomenon?

  • Alex Byrne

Homeland

The new generation of Nigerian writers.

  • Andrée Greene

Paradise Lost

The novels of Sarah Waters.

  • Jan Clausen

The Beginning of Wisdom

Like many other writers of his time, H.G. Wells thought of himself as a Man of the Future, but his style of self-presentation remained Victorian.

  • Vivian Gornick

The Crucible

Sex Education in the United States.

  • Maureen N. McLane

Orientalism Revisited

Edward Said’s unfinished critique.

  • Lawrence Rosen

The Quiet Man

John McGahern’s Ireland.

  • Roger Boylan

The Lesser Evil

Using American force wisely.

  • Anatol Lieven

Native Speaker

An Arab citizen of Israel and a native speaker of Palestinian Arabic, Sayed Kashua writes in Hebrew.

  • Laila Lalami

New England Stories

 What sort of stories do New Englanders tell?

  • G.C. Waldrep

The Forbidden Experiment

What can we learn from the wild child?

  • Rebecca Saxe
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