If things had gone slightly differently for Kenyan author Ng?g? wa Thiong'o, he might have become a living, breathing vindication of the British Empire's good intentions. Despite...
There was a period, shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution, when the history of the Russian temperance movement became thoroughly intertwined with the history of Russian social...
The biggest difference between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and David Foster Wallace is that by the time cardiomyopathy took Coleridge’s life in 1834, at the age of sixty-one, the...
I lost my taste for rhapsodies to the power of reading—rhapsodies like Teju Cole’s—around the same time I became a halfway competent reader. It was two months ...
Everyone forgets that Nathan Leopold died a free man. The first part of his story is familiar enough: He and Richard Loeb were two intellectually precocious teenagers from...
Harold Bloom happened to be at Cornell during one of the most famous student protests of the “canon wars,” one in which black students went en masse into the various...
Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, unless the family consists of a morally depraved patriarch and three highly differentiated siblings who, after years out of contact...
The idea of David Brooks teaching a class on the subject of humility at Yale strikes a lot of people as inherently funny, and making allowances for mean-spiritedness (and I dare...
The same quality that makes Russian novels so distinctive in world literature can also transform even sensitive Anglophone readers into the boy at the back of English class who...
Without wading too deep into any technical lit-crit battles over the so-called death of the author, I think I can safely endorse the rule that, in general, one should not criticize...
I have no idea how Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonskyâ??s translation of The Brothers Karamazov came to be regarded as definitive. Let me rephrase that. I know why. Fourteen...
