November 6, 2025 Issue

Jed Perl

Impassioned Ferocity

A critic’s power lies in the testing of deeply held beliefs about the nature of art and art’s place in the world against the experience of specific artworks.

Authority

by Andrea Long Chu

All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess

by Becca Rothfeld

Those Passions: On Art and Politics

by T.J. Clark

Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies

by Jonathan Kramnick

No Judgment

by Lauren Oyler

April Bernard

Inside the Music

The decline of traditional newspaper reviews of new music offers an opportunity to expand our ideas of what music criticism could be.

Mark Lilla

Storm Warnings

The MAGA movement is not fed by conservative ideas but by a nihilistic, apocalyptic determination to stage a counterrevolution against the Sixties, against liberalism, against even democracy itself.

When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s

by John Ganz

Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right

by Laura K. Field

Ben Lerner

A Brief Literary Emancipation

Early modern female writers, who were denied the sort of authority usually needed to write literary criticism, were also freed from its constraints.

Sex and Style: Literary Criticism and Gender in Early Modern England

by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann

Cora Currier

Pervasive Impunity

Richard Beck’s Homeland charts how four presidential administrations managed to evade moral responsibility for the “war on terror” by hiding behind legality and process.

Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life

by Richard Beck

Regina Marler

Avant-Garde Égalité

Gabriële Buffet-Picabia tended to minimize her part in the development of modern art, but a new book positions her as a central figure.

Gabriële

by Anne and Claire Berest, translated from the French by Tina Kover

Maira Kalman

On Devil’s Island

Alfred Dreyfus: Vérité et justice

Peter E. Gordon

Secular Priests

In its efforts to define religion, modern sociology has also sought to define itself.

Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Wyatt Mason

An Epistolary Critic

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

The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays

by Guy Davenport, with an introduction by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner

edited by Edward M. Burns

Guy Davenport and James Laughlin: Selected Letters

edited by W.C. Bamberger

I Remember This Detail: 40 Letters from and 4 Essays on Guy Davenport

edited by W.C. Bamberger

A Garden Carried in a Pocket: Letters, 1964–1968

by Guy Davenport and Jonathan Williams, edited by Thomas Meyer

The Guy Davenport Reader

edited and with an afterword by Erik Reece

The Sayings of Jesus: The Logia of Yeshua

translated from the Greek and with commentaries by Guy Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia

A Balthus Notebook

by Guy Davenport

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Josephine Quinn

‘Insider and Outsider’

How did Saint Augustine’s African origins and his life among Christians there shape his theology?

Augustine the African

by Catherine Conybeare

Geoffrey O’Brien

Mason Bates’s operatic adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay condenses the encyclopedic novel into a story about two outsiders caught between the harsh reality of World War II and their success as creators of a comic book superhero.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

an opera by Mason Bates, with a libretto by Gene Scheer, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, September 21–October 11, 2025

Francine Prose

Eden of Wolves

A nineteenth-century novella daringly suggests that there’s no reason the apparently contradictory theories of creationism and evolutionism can’t be reconciled.

Adam and Eve in Paradise

by Eça de Queirós, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa

Amit Majmudar

Critical Theory

a poem

Nitin K. Ahuja

Looking Behind the Veil

Can the tools of science be used to investigate the mysteries of death?

Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death

by Sam Parnia

Hillary Kelly

Bedsit Metamorphoses

Tessa Hadley’s greatest subject is the unfulfilled promise of womanhood.

The Party

by Tessa Hadley

After the Funeral and Other Stories

by Tessa Hadley

Free Love

by Tessa Hadley

Bad Dreams and Other Stories

by Tessa Hadley

The Past

by Tessa Hadley

Clever Girl

by Tessa Hadley

Married Love and Other Stories

by Tessa Hadley

The Master Bedroom

by Tessa Hadley

Everything Will Be All Right

by Tessa Hadley

Accidents in the Home

by Tessa Hadley

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David A. Bell

A Baleful Legacy

Enlightenment writers who proposed ways of improving and even perfecting the human species laid the theoretical foundations of modern racism.

Enlightenment Biopolitics: A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens

by William Max Nelson

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.

Baldwin: A Love Story

by Nicholas Boggs

Issue Details

Cover art
Cy Gavin: Untitled (Human heart), 2023
(Leonardo Cestari/Gagosian)
Series art
Bénédicte Thoraval:
Danse de tilleul (Linden Dance), 2025