Clair Wills

Blood Work

A rare genetic mutation is best treated the nineteenth-century way, with bloodletting, showing up the strengths and weaknesses of the NHS.

A Mind Cast Out

The New Zealand writer Janet Frame insisted on the distinction between her fiction and her autobiography, yet it was the fiction that crystallized her own isolation in psychiatric wards.

Making Sense of the Missing 

“Some people were allowed to belong in families and others weren’t.”

Triumphs of Skepticism

Hilary Mantel wrote in favor of the doubting, the irreverent, and even the fickle against conservatism, nostalgia, and sentiment.

The Collector

For the characters in Jeremy Cooper’s novels, art—looking at it, talking about it, sending it in the form of postcards—is the currency of human relationships.

Family Lore

In her latest book, Marina Warner uses her skills as a mythographer to tell the story of her parents’ lives in postwar Cairo.

A Lesson from Ireland

Decades of forced birth and coerced adoption convinced the Irish people to lift a state ban on abortion. Will Americans learn the hard way, too?

Letters from a Scattered Place

John McGahern’s plain prose hides a pileup of cruelties and injustices.

The Wages of Virtue

Chastity seems like a simple concept, but a new history proposes that it has always been a shifting and malleable virtue.

The Possessed

In Carl Frode Tiller’s trilogy of novels, the varied accounts of the narrator’s youth build to a judgment on the ethics of writing itself.

Bildungsonline

Patricia Lockwood descends into Internet hell in her debut novel and winds up confronting America’s very real religious zealotry.

Learning to Grieve

A poet and a psychologist consider the necessity of mourning our dead.

Stepping Out

The joy of dancing as a follower is to listen for the barely said—to interpret signs almost before they have been given, to read messages in the moment they are being sent.

A Woman’s Performance

Ghost Story

On ‘The Mirror and the Light,’ the third volume in Hilary Mantel’s life of Thomas Cromwell

Love in Plague Time

In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, a novel that follows several hundred years in the life of an English nunnery in the Middle Ages, prioresses come and go, novices prove better or worse bets, and the masons leave the new chapel spire unfinished. But the interior voice speaks across the centuries.

The Truth Alone

The Unnameable

Prodigal Fathers

Colm Tóibín’s ‘Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce’

Family Secrets