Lionel Trilling crystallizes the cynical Cold War liberalism that sacrificed idealism for self-restraint.

The novel Kindred reminds us—emphatically, gruesomely—that white supremacy is us too.

In her scholarship, mentoring, and activism, Farah Jasmine Griffin brings a praxis of radical love to an unequal academy.

László Krasznahorkai’s latest novel reflects on the power of the surveillance state through the perspective of a librarian who wishes to lock up all books.

In her new book, Danish poet Olga Ravn writes with open love, pity, and compassion for her strange yet familiar creations.

A new book offers a compelling, if imperfect, account of the bad feelings with which trans people often struggle.

Toni Morrison’s novels imagine a society governed by an ethic of care, devoted to restoring and repairing those who have been harmed, and giving them the space for transformation.

A recent government report gave UFOs a rebrand, but so many basic questions remain unanswered.

Newly translated into English, Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel is a vivid portrait of immigrant displacement and the ironies of our global cultural ecosystem.

Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship with her readers was a mutually demanding collaboration.

Michel Houellebecq’s Islamophobia and chauvinism have made him a favorite intellectual of right extremists. So why does he appeal to so many on the left as well?

The Florentine humanist’s description of the Black Death in the Decameron remains one of the most thoughtful accounts of a society living under a pandemic.

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

A timely new documentary celebrates Morrison’s novels, but downplays the enduring power of her work as an editor and essayist.

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.

Neel Mukherjee is part of a new generation of Indian writers dissecting postcolonialism’s failed promise of a classless society.

A science fiction writer remembers his early correspondences with Ursula Le Guin.

We live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s.

An interview with China Miéville.

“However you find your society . . . you do not have to embrace its lies, or become complicitors in its cruelties,” wrote E. L. Doctorow, whose novels offer a map for navigating the Trump era.

Bad readers were not born; they were created. To know them is to understand literature and politics in postwar America.

What makes biography good?

From invading Afghanistan to dismantling Confederate monuments, George Orwell has been pressed into the service of all sorts of causes. But the real Orwell remains unknown.

On this day, the Crows of the region joined the history of People, and their own history began.

The personal essay is not dead, but has it traded politics for style?

Junot Díaz interviews Margaret Atwood about The Handmaid's Tale, political dystopias, and Drake.

A new generation of young Polish novelists has turned to dystopia to express Poland's cultural and economic contradictions.

The art and life of John Fante.