The horrors of the twentieth century left artists and thinkers preoccupied with the problem of evil. How could Germans herd Jewish families into the gas chambers? How could Serbs turn on their Bosnian neighbors, or Hutus pick up machetes and carry out the bloody work of genocidaires? In
About halfway through By Blood, Ellen Ullman's marvelously creepy new novel, Dr. Dora Schussler, a tight-lipped, determinedly impersonal therapist, confides to her own therapist the story of her childhood. Her father was an SS officer, a "true believer in the Fuhrer and the Master Race," whose job
I recently bought a book about the future of books. It's called The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, and features twenty-six authors describing what they think might become of literature. Given the collection's prophetic subtitle, and that I was reading it on my new,
If the publishing industry really does collapse, as some predict it will, it won't be the big houses or the independent bookstores that will be most affected, it will be Hollywood. This year's crop of Oscar contenders raises the question "Can there be a cinema without books?" I'm skeptical. Try to
At first a convenience, then quickly a conundrum: Of course we would publish on the internet. We came of age with the medium, it was our generation's default. Plus, financially speaking, it remained—and remains, for now—a wheat-paste endeavor: nine dollars a month to hold down a domain name. A
Colm Tóibín is fascinated by writers' relationships with their families. In New Ways to Kill Your Mother, a series of review-essays, he works away at and through his obsessions: family, homosexuality, homeland, the anxiety of influence. Along the way, he tells us plenty about himself, such as what
Certain writers are too weird to fully belong to their own time. Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky—a Soviet writer obsessed with Kant and Shakespeare, whose own life barely rippled beyond a small coterie of Muscovite writers before his death in 1950—is among them. Krzhizhanovsky wrote philosophical works
The Republican presidential nomination contest, which has entered a lull before it presses toward a probable showdown in March and April, when thirty primaries and caucuses will be held, has found its script. It will be a struggle between the "establishment" candidate and one or another "insurgent."
Where Art Belongs, the title of Chris Kraus's latest collection of essays, sounds corrective. As if, instead of in its proper place, art is elsewhere. It has been mislaid, like a cell phone. Or perhaps, like a vase, not so much lost as thoughtlessly positioned. Where is art, and who put it there?
The author of "Once Upon a Secret," Mimi Alford, had an affair with President John F. Kennedy before she was old enough to vote. Having kept this story under wraps for almost 50 years, Ms. Alford now sets off a firestorm of gossip about its sordid details. If there is one question that Ms. Alford's
