The Fighter
/Norman Mailer was as fiery and mercurial a letter-writer as he was a novelist and journalist - and ten times as prolific. A big new volume collects the highlights of a lifetime in the post.
Read MoreNot What Isaiah Had in Mind
/Can a book about the Jewish Diaspora add anything useful on the topic if it's uninterested in Jewish history and slightly dodgy about the Diaspora? Jordan MaGill gives Alan Wolfe's At Home in Exile a close reading.
Read MoreThinking in Common
/The great critic and essayist Irving Howe laid claim to a great many decayed traditions - and then elevated them all to high art. A new collection of his prose presents some of his gems.
Read MoreStop Their World Spinning
/Against a pervasive American sports culture, author Steve Allmond pits a devastating critique of the savage violence - and staggering toll in injuries and deaths - of football.
Read MoreTitle Menu: A list of great political books that doesn't include What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer
/Just in time for the November midterm elections, we do what doubters said couldn't be done: we present you with a list of ten great political books that doesn't include Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes.
Read MoreMore Faith, Better Grounded
/A reissue of James Agee's letters to Father Flye give a picture of the writer's naked ambition, excoriating self-hatred, and unrefined genius. But it also raises the question: Do we remember Agee more for what he wrote or what his addictions prevented him from writing?
Read MoreThe Book of Abraham
/Veteran historian Brookhiser takes a look at the formative influences on Abraham Lincoln - not so much his own father as the Founding Fathers.
Read MoreGrosz Anatomy
/In his latest collection of essays, Theater of Cruelty, Ian Buruma launches a series of expert investigations into the springs of cruelty and the perils of victomhood.
Read MoreWoven and Severed
/For millennia, the mighty tales in the epics of Homer have challenged and enthralled the world; a thought-provoking new book seeks to understand why.
Read MoreThe Other John Cage
/John Cage’s controversial music is his best-known legacy, but his voluminous writings and artwork, equally inventive, have been unfairly neglected. It’s time to right this wrong.
Read MoreWAKE UUUUP!
/What does the summer of 1989, when Do the Right Thing hit theaters, have to say to the summer of Ferguson, and police militarization, and race relations today?
Read MoreTitle Menu: 10 Minutes from Prometheus
/Ridley Scott's Prometheus, ill-served by critics when it appeared last year, is the finest sequel to the Alien movies yet made. Our contributing editor chooses ten exemplary minutes to make his case.
Read MoreThe Grey Zone
/Gertrude van Tijn helped more than 20,000 Jews escape occupied Holland. What does it mean that, in saving their lives, she had to collaborate with Nazis?
Read MoreAn Ignorant Highbrow
/If you think distinctions between 'high' and 'low' art are stuffy Victorian relics, our beleagured Stephen Akey says, you're just not paying enough attention. So are you a highbrow? And should you be? And should everybody be?
Read MoreTitle Menu: 10 Great "Minor" Works by Major Writers
/The great writers of the ages were hardly (often) one-hit wonders. In praise of diversity, the staff at OLM celebrate the lesser-known b-sides of some pretty well known pens.
Read MoreGrand Affiliations
/Metaphor: a tool for poets and rhetoricians, but also, perhaps, the way that people connect to the world at large. Lianne Habinek reviews a gamesome new study by the great literary critic Denis Donoghue.
Read MoreSocrates Offside
/What place do deep questions about the meaning of life have in our technological age? Is philosophy more important than ever?
Read MoreA Picture Book
/Cover art from Omni, the new-age science mag of yore, is now a coffee table book: Giger, Frazetta, and Grant Wood are all here, but something crucial has been left out.
Read MoreSleeping In
/Sam Harris, one of the "Four Horsemen" of the New Atheist movement, has written a book about how to live a spiritual life without religion. But does this anti-preacher book come off a bit preachy? Maybe even, awkwardly enough, dogmatic?
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