“Monsters lurk everywhere”: Sarah Weinman uncovers the real-life crime behind Nabokov’s Lolita
The first rule of Fight Club: Violence in Congress and the road to civil war
New biography of Madeleine L’Engle by her granddaughters is a “journey of becoming”
Brad Gooch: Flannery O’Connor’s apocalyptic tall tales “give us the news that we need to hear”
Terrence Rafferty: Elmore Leonard’s West is “an idea of the West”
The novels and poetry of Albert Murray: “He is beyond category”
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the “iconic piece of literature” that changed the way we think of the world
Michelle Dean’s Sharp celebrates ten women writers who did it their way
Pulitzer winner Caroline Fraser on the “deep and unresolved tensions” in the Little House books
Reinhold Niebuhr combined “tough-minded political realism with a sympathetic understanding of society’s injustices”
A. Scott Berg: How World War I and America tells the earth-shattering story of an “unnecessary” war
How antislavery writings reconnect us with one of the most crucial themes in American literary history
The Escape, first published play by an African American, leaps to the New York City stage
Ezra Greenspan on William Wells Brown: “The most rivetingly inventive, entertaining black writer of his era”
J. Michael Lennon: Norman Mailer “recognized the permanent cleft in the American character”
Sportswriter Alexander Wolff: “Basketball becomes a way of working through things”
