Alternate histories like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America—newly adapted by HBO—force us to imagine a different America.

Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness movingly depicts the vulnerabilities of queer desire, but it also continues a long tradition of exoticizing Eastern European sexuality.

The artist exploded the idea of what a book can be. For him, it was not a thing, but an instrument—something to do something with.

A draft executive order condemns the modernism of an aesthetic elite in favor of popular neoclassicism.

Until recent decades, Dickinson was most often depicted as a sentimental spinster or reclusive eccentric. A new biography and TV show reveal instead a self-aware artist who created a life that defied the limits placed on women.

The author of Moby Dick is best known for his novels, but he devoted the second half of his life to writing poetry.

The winner of the National Book Award for Translated Literature serves up an apocalyptic vision of Hungarian society.

The beauty of the language should not keep us from reckoning with its history.

What the debate between William Buckley and James Baldwin reveals about the modern conservative movement. 

The hostile reaction to Binyamin Appelbaum's new book reveals the tensions within the economics profession over some of its most self-serving myths.

Science fiction author Ted Chiang wrote the story for the Academy Award–winning film Arrival. Now his new collection of short stories gives us further glimpses of possible futures.

Three new books paint a chilling portrait of darkness in Wall Street, the law, and technology. But the apocalyptic metaphors obscure the real problem, hindering how we fight back.

In their new book, Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, and Henry Paulson describe fighting the fire of the 2008 financial crisis. But while they did rebuild the burnt towers of Wall Street, they left Main Street to dig out from the rubble.

An insider account reveals how the Obama administration’s botched bailout deal reinforced neoliberalism and betrayed campaign promises.

Amazing Grace, the long-lost film of Franklin’s gospel album, offers a lesson in the deep connections between gospel and soul music.

The structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss is in many ways still with us.

For the philosopher and intellectual historian Hans Blumenberg, myths and metaphors were pivotal to philosophical thinking, not opposed to it.

Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, reduces racial inequality to a matter of psychological impairment that can be overcome through grit and grin.

Hye-young Pyun’s surreal, violent novels reject stereotypes about Korean women’s writing, taking up global themes of environmental collapse and the loneliness of city life.