This article appeared in the New York Times MORE THAN I LOVE MY LIFE By David Grossman Translated by Jessica Cohen Like Aladdin and his...

This article appeared in Book Forum. One Friday in April: A Story of Suicide and Survival by Donald Antrim DEPRESSION, FOR ALL THAT HAS...

This article appeared in the New York Times. THE URGE Our History of Addiction By Carl Erik Fisher Our culture, ever on the lookout for...

This article appeared in Vogue. As an omnivorous reader, I expected the start of COVID-19 to bring out all my high-minded readerly...

This article appeared in the New York Times. LIFE WITHOUT CHILDREN Stories By Roddy Doyle The act of pulling off good sentences, one...

This article appeared in the New York Times. In 1979, as a young and intrepid critic, I devoted my books column in The New Leader to Joan...

This article appeared in Bookforum BURNING MAN: THE TRIALS OF D. H. LAWRENCE BY FRANCES WILSON HAS THERE EVER BEEN A WRITER more reviled...

WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST DO WHAT YOU WERE TOLD? Essays By Jenny Diski I’ve never been quite sure what the phrase “an acquired taste” is...

PHILIP ROTH: THE BIOGRAPHY By Blake Bailey I SUPPOSE IT MIGHT BE SAID—and, in fact, has been said in one form or another since this...

What Endless Love By Scott Spencer (1979) 1. Before Scott Spencer’s novel was made into not one but two cheesy movies, it began life as a...

RED COMET The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath By Heather Clark What becomes a legend most? As suggested by the old...

Whenever I pick up a new book by a woman I check the author biography on the back flap to see whether she has children. I’m not entirely...

From the wreckage of his life, Richard Yates salvaged a few good books Posthumous literary reputations are tricky affairs, as is the...

Jean Rhys articulated the plight of the abandoned woman Jean Rhys lived a hard-luck life and wrote, almost exclusively, about hard-luck...

Claire Messud’s novel of a stalled woman artist From the outset, it’s been clear that Claire Messud has all the necessary equipment—a...

Two books explore England’s master-servant divide SERVANTS: A DOWNSTAIRS HISTORY OF BRITAIN FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY TO MODERN TIMES...

This is how much I liked Catherine Lacey’s début novel, “Nobody Is Ever Missing”: I read it over a summer weekend, mostly transfixed,...

Did the Jazz Age ever exist — apart from being a cultural construct, that is, a coinage credited to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and one that he...

THE GENIUS OF JUDAISM By Bernard-Henri Lévy Translated by Steven B. Kennedy 240 pp. Random House. $28. What is one to make of...

The idea that great psychic suffering is conducive to art—that mental illness and creativity are somehow intertwined—is a longstanding...