Brontez Purnell is nothing if not prolific. The author of seven books, most recently Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt: A Memoir in ...

We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in ...

Chuck Berry: An American Life, by RJ Smith. Hachette. 432 pages. $32. By the time Chuck Berry had his breakout hit “Maybellene” in the summer of 1955, he was already nearly thirty years old, with ...

Twenty-five years ago, the philosopher Richard Rorty accomplished something many writers aspire to but few ever pull off: he predicted the future. Toward the end of his 1998 book Achieving Our Country ...

The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants, by Adam Goodman. Princeton University Press. 336 pages. $29.95. What we imagine when we think of deportation proceedings, if we ...

Let’s start with a wicked little paragraph. Guy Debord chose to kill himself the old-fashioned way; Jean-Luc Godard—“the dumbest Swiss Maoist of them all,” in the words of the amusing ...

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I led a virtual discussion of War and Peace, with the thought that someone else might enjoy reading the novel with me. Three thousand people ended up ...

The Childhood of Jesus, by J. M. Coetzee. Penguin Books. 288 pages. $16. The Schooldays of Jesus, by J. M. Coetzee. Penguin Books. 272 pages. $16. The Death of Jesus ...

From an introduction to the audiobook edition of J. F. Martel’s Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, which was released in May by Hachette Audio. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the ...

In 1974, my mother was twenty years old, trying to make it as a theater actress in New York after dropping out of Bennington College. She was in a painting class led by the eccentric Ukrainian-Jewish ...

Writing about “Woke” has at least two pitfalls. One is that any criticism of its excesses provokes accusations of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or white supremacy. The other problem is ...

From “Romance Without Love, Love Without Romance,” which was published in the Spring 2021 issue of Liberties. I have only ever had one friend as crazy as I am. Once, we painted a giant fireplace onto ...