Literature
Writers and their day jobs: William S. Burroughs was an insect exterminator, Joseph Heller a blacksmith, James Joyce worked in a movie theater
How Bennett Cerf — "part Gatsby, part glad-handing salesman and part starstruck fanboy" — built a publishing powerhouse, and sold it away
Adam Tooze is a renowned economic historian. But is he really “a sort of platonic ideal of the universal intellectual?”
Book Review: ‘Fly, Wild Swans,’ by Jung Chang
Laura Dave on Her Favorite Books and the Sequel to ‘The Last Thing He Told Me’
Sigmund Freud’s plants. He gave Virginia Woolf a narcissus and brought a zimmerlinde on his escape from Vienna. Why?
John — sparsely toothed with mismatched old clothes — could most often be found at UCLA, burnishing his reputation as the last intellectual
Picasso’s women. "Two wives, four cohabitations: What of it? Genius has license to trample"
Harper Lee Expanded on Her View of the South in Letters to a Friend
Dramas Keep Showing Us Hapless Men — and Hypercompetent Women
Book Review: ‘The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes,’ by Tatiana Tibuleac
Book Review: ‘Call Me Ishmaelle,’ by Xiaolu Guo
The idea of revolution has transformed political thought across two millennia. Can we even agree on what it means?
One night in 1973, three Jackson Pollock paintings were stolen. The case continues to reverberate in surprising ways
Famous for telling writers to embrace their “shitty first drafts,” Bird by Bird is one of the most popular writing guides of all time. Is it any good?