The Communist Thrillers of Anna Seghers
In her tautly suspenseful novels, fugitives stay one step ahead of the Nazis, Alex Ross writes.
A Critic at Large
admin Why Is Illness So Hard to Write About?
Hermione Hoby on “On Being Ill,” by Virginia Woolf, and how, a century after Woolf posed the question, writers like…
Why America Looks the Way It Does
Daniel Immerwahr reviews “Property Values: The Rise and Fall of the American Homeowner,” by Joshua Specht.
The Curious Power of Punctuation
Louis Menand reviews “On the Mark,” by Florence Hazrat, and “Verb Your Enthusiasm,” by Sarah Kaufman.
Is Zionism’s Moral Crisis About Roads Not Taken—or Original Sin?
Isaac Chotiner reviews “Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History,” by Benjamin Moser, and “Israel: What Went Wrong?,” by Omer Bartov.
Peter Hujar’s Search for Secrets
Hilton Als reviews “Hujar:Contact,” at the Morgan Library. The photographer’s portraits bring certain truths to the surface.
What Happened to Your Face?
Cal Revely-Calder reviews “The Face: A Cultural History,” by Fay Bound-Alberti, and considers how our faces, once deeply personal, became…
Why the Odyssey Keeps Defeating Filmmakers
David Denby considers the challenges facing Christopher Nolan’s upcoming quarter-billion-dollar film adaptation of Homer’s epic poem, “The Odyssey,” starring Matt…
The Prehistory of A.I. Slop
Jill Lepore chronicles the rise of machine-generated writing, from a Hollywood plot-writing grift and Cold War computer poetry to the…