Nation Topics - Essays | The Nation

A new collection of short pieces by the prodigious and wide-ranging critic Luc Sante doubles as a history of Modernism's outlaws.

Edmund Wilson's politics have long been criticized, but his views were more nuanced than you might think.

Edward Said's musical predilections capture the full complexity of the master theorist.

The Surrealist dissident Raymond Queneau turned his writings into a lab for his experiments, and the results are still exhilarating.

Clive James's erudite new collection of essays celebrates the best of twentieth-century art, thought and politics.

At the Same Time, Susan Sontag's posthumous collection of essays and speeches, reveals her rapt attention to the world around her.

In a book-length essay on the novel, Milan Kundera foresees the curtain of literary history drawing to a close.

With the "war on terror" now official nomenclature, the
problematic conflating of ethnic, religious and "terrorist" identities
is now a matter of policy as well as media distortion. In a 1986 book
review, Edward Said argues presciently against the
dangerous "terrorism craze"--"dangerous because it consolidates the
immense, unrestrained pseudopatriotic narcissism we are nourishing."

Every other week, in the pages of this magazine, Katha Pollitt collects
her thoughts in her column, "Subject to Debate." To say that Pollitt's
column is a hotbed of feminist polemic is only par

As Nazis dropped bombs in Warsaw, poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote a collection of literary criticism that sought to trace the rise of totalitarianism by deconstructing the mythologies of Western modernity.