Criticism & Features

In her towering biography of one of the most powerful unelected officials in American history, Beverly Gage tells the story of the quintessential Government Man, John Edgar Hoover. He reigned

Consummate essayist and novelist Darryl Pinckney’s lively and layered memoir has so much going on—any given page is rich with anecdotes, insights, and searching questions—that it eludes a quick summary.

Sarah and Angelina Grimke have been celebrated as the sisters who came to abhor the slave system upon which their prominent South Carolina slaveholding family’s wealth depended. They defied the

Though aimed at the literary humanities—the loose cluster of English, philosophy, history, and theological studies that, if current debates are any indication, have fallen on hard times—Peter Brooks’s Seduced by

“History is a tale we tell, not a perfect account of reality,” reflects a young Hua Hsu to his friend Ken in Stay True (Doubleday). “You just have to figure

“Bernadette Mayer’s Milkweed Smithereens (New Directions), a collection of older and newer poems, offers further proof of her importance in the contemporary American poetry landscape. Mayer’s poetry has always been an exuberant

In the excellent English translation by Sophie Hughes, Alia Trabucco Zerán recounts talking about her book, originally published as Las homicidas. “‘Women who kill,’ I reply, time and again, when

If Groucho Marx and Richard Pryor became mathematics professors and decided to collaborate on a spoof of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, they might come up with something like Percival