The Recognitions, by William Gaddis. NYRB Classics. 976 pages. $27.95. J R, by William Gaddis. NYRB Classics. 784 pages. $24.95. Readers with more than passing interest in the twentieth-century novel ...

In the October issue, the journalist Belén Fernández, who has visited the Darién several times between 2023 and 2026, documents the whipsawing transformations that those villagers have experienced ...

How to explain to her daughter. Back when she was in college, she had taken a literary seminar for which she’d had to read Kafka’s “Letter to His Father.” After the class had discussed it, the teacher ...

[Conversation] Burn Pits Joseph Hickman discusses his new book, The Burn Pits, which tells the story of thousands of U.S. soldiers who, after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, have developed rare ...

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, by Andrew Graham-Dixon. W. W. Norton. 416 pages. $45. There’s an anecdote that crops up sooner or later in almost any book about Johannes Vermeer. In 1663, a French ...

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The reality of Israel’s conduct is finally catching up to it. It was easier, not long ago, to ignore, or even support, the destruction of Palestinian society in the West… ...

We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in ...

Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, by Karl Marx. Edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press. 944 pages. $39.95. Our doomed thought ...

The word “relevant,” I was recently surprised to discover, shares an etymology with the word “relieve.” This seems obvious enough once you know it—only a few letters separate the words—but their ...

Twenty-five years ago, the philosopher Richard Rorty accomplished something many writers aspire to but few ever pull off: he predicted the future. Toward the end of his 1998 book Achieving Our Country ...