Literature

Biography & Memoir

Epic Ambitions

A new life of Gertrude Stein treats her as a philosopher of language to trust, not explain—and gathers force from archival discoveries and intriguing plots of her reception and reputation.

February 12, 2026 issue

Darryl Pinckney

Love’s Anguish and Force and Terror

Nicholas Boggs structures his moving new biography of James Baldwin around the writer’s most important relationships with men.

November 6, 2025 issue

Anthony Domestico

Ever Inward

A biography of the poet Amy Clampitt shows how poetry germinated throughout her life and blossomed in a late-career flourishing.

December 4, 2025 issue

Miranda Seymour

Mary Shelley’s ‘Hideous Progeny’

Through Mary Shelley’s letters, journal, and work-in-progress, we can trace the development of Frankenstein from a simple ghost story to her most famous novel.

November 20, 2025 issue

Wyatt Mason

An Epistolary Critic

The correspondence of Guy Davenport is a syllabus for the twentieth century.

November 6, 2025 issue

Jé Wilson

That Sinking Feeling

Memoirs of survival at sea plunge the reader deep into the heart of human nature.

December 18, 2025 issue

John Banville

Henry James’s ‘Dear Native Land’

The writer’s 1904 tour of America left him little less than horrified at what he encountered.

December 18, 2025 issue

Jeremy Denk

Satie’s Spell

Erik Satie took down the arrogance of late Romantic classical music, gently but ruthlessly taking up its vocabulary and removing all the excess, including authorship.

January 15, 2026 issue

Great Lives

Marie-Antoinette; unfinished portrait by Alexander Kucharsky, 1791–1792

Lynn Hunt

Marie Antoinette: Why Was She So Hated?

How Marie Antoinette tried to save the monarchy.

November 5, 2020 issue

Fintan O’Toole

A Moral Witness

Martha Gellhorn’s letters to her lovers and intimate friends involve a remarkable feat of reportage on the war within Gellhorn herself

October 8, 2020 issue

Michael Gorra

Young Woman from the Provinces

Benjamin Moser’s Sontag: Her Life and Work

February 27, 2020 issue

More in Biography & Memoir

On Mrs. Shakespeare

Charles Nicholl

Who Is Mrs. Shakspaire? What Is She?

Two long-neglected fragments of a letter seem likely, on recent closer examination, to represent the first known correspondence of Anne Shakespeare.

August 5, 2025

Stephen Greenblatt

A Wisewoman in Stratford

Hamnet imagines a literary legacy for Shakespeare’s wife and son.

January 14, 2021 issue

Stanley Wells

Mistress Shakespeare

“Germaine Greer reasonably sees no good reason to suppose that Shakespeare was not genuinely in love with Ann when he impregnated her. It has been realized since 1971 that Sonnet 145, with its pun on ‘hate away,’ is likely to be a product of his courtship.”

April 17, 2008 issue

Anne Barton

Was Shakespeare a Chauvinist?

“The fact is that throughout his career Shakespeare celebrated married sexuality and women’s active participation in it.”

June 11, 1981 issue

Gore Vidal (1925–2012)

Gore Vidal

A selection of Gore Vidal’s contributions to the New York Review. Read all of his essays here.

Gore Vidal

American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction

July 15, 1976 issue

Gore Vidal

Lincoln Up Close

August 15, 1991 issue

Gore Vidal

On Rereading the Oz Books

October 13, 1977 issue

Gore Vidal

Scott’s Case

May 1, 1980 issue

Gore Vidal

An American Sissy

August 13, 1981 issue

Gore Vidal

Remembering Orson Welles

June 1, 1989 issue

The Latest

Mark Polizzotti, in conversation with Jarrett Earnest

Mark Polizzotti on André Breton, Translation, and Surrealism

Episode 7 of Private Life

March 25, 2026

Miranda Seymour

Deciphering Dame Muriel

In Electric Spark, Frances Wilson attempts to crack the ingenious codes that were of prime importance in Muriel Spark’s life and writing.

April 9, 2026 issue

Pablo Scheffer

The Tennissance

Two young tennis stars have revived the sport by embodying the sort of athletic-aesthetic duality that made Nadal and Federer so fascinating.

April 9, 2026 issue

Mark Lilla

Clown Show

In every era a certain kind of unprincipled demagogue driven by an insatiable need for attention and a sense of what will capture the public’s imagination rises to the fore. In the early years of France’s Third Republic, it was the ludicrous Marquis de Morès.

March 26, 2026 issue

Thomas Powers

A Real Live Socialist

What Bernie Sanders brought to the job of mayor of Burlington and what he did with it help explain what matters to him and how he fits into American political argument.

March 12, 2026 issue

Alec Wilkinson

The Wandering Physicist

Luis Alvarez brought a scientific pragmatism to many of the twentieth century’s greatest mysteries, including the secrets of pyramids, the Kennedy assassination, and the disappearance of the dinosaurs.

March 12, 2026 issue

Linda Greenhouse

As Kennedy Went

Justice Anthony Kennedy often confounded Supreme Court observers with his seemingly unpredictable opinions, but during the years when a majority could be achieved only through some measure of compromise, he wielded enormous power over the Constitution’s contemporary meaning.

March 12, 2026 issue

Christopher Benfey

Road Trippers

In a thirty-three-day ramble along the Hudson and Connecticut Rivers in 1791, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison encountered many of the issues that would end up plaguing the United States.

March 12, 2026 issue