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Nikolai Leskov’s The Enchanted Wandered and Other Stories; Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself

A history of how risk management profits from manufacturing new forms of uncertainty and insecurity.

The Book of My Lives, Aleksandar Hemon, Sarajevo, Radovan Karadzic,

How did everything a writer had known and loved come violently apart?

No one dies for poetry anymore, not even in Russia. Enter the oligarchs, who steer clear of Putin’s ire by sponsoring literary prizes.

Illustration for My So-Called "Post-Feminist" Literary Life

Slut-shaming, name-calling and no respect: welcome to life in literary America for a 21st century female author.

Engraving depicting Athanasius Kircher

How did a man who got so many things wrong become an intellectual celebrity in his own lifetime?

An unreliable anthropologist of traditional societies is a no less dubious diagnostician of the contemporary world.

Blogs

On the late Daniel Bell, the very archetype of a committed liberal intellectual, and The New Republic's Marty Peretz, plus reader mail.

January 27, 2011

The president said many objectionable things in selling his tax- cut plan, but his assertions about America's history of compromising was too much to stomach.

December 8, 2010

You can get anything you want at... or can you? Tim Graham thinks not.

November 23, 2010

 A look back on John Lennon's New York years.

November 22, 2010

American culture from Saul Bellows to Janeane Garofalo to NPR.

October 14, 2010

Obama is aware of the danger of morphing into George W. Bush.

September 22, 2010

A former covert CIA operative turned novelist is fast emerging as one of the most important fiction writers in the military/covert ops/political thriller genre dominated by right-wing authors.

June 29, 2010

Nation writer Corey Robin discusses Ayn Rand's kitsch philosophy.

June 1, 2010