The City That Embodies the United States’ Contradictions

In the history of St. Louis, we find both a radical and reactionary past—and a more hopeful future too.

Robert Greene II

The Mundane and Alienated Life of a Freelancer

Kavita Bedford’s novel Friends and Dark Shapes explores the false promises and precarity of writing in the age of the gig economy.

Lily Meyer

Mike Gold, Avant-Garde Bard of Proletarian New York

A new biography charts Gold's many lives—as a novelist and journalist, as a working-class militant, and as a forerunner to the Beats.

J. Hoberman

Diane Seuss’s American Gothic

frank: sonnets is an oracular collection of verse on mortality, tragedy, love, and life.

Lauren Stroh

The Brutal Transcendence of Tove Ditlevsen

By resisting all of memoir’s conventions, the Danish writer tells the story of her life more painfully and beautifully.

Marie Solis

The Hedonist Bard of the Midlife Crisis

Why you should and shouldn’t read the provocative poems of Frederick Seidel.

David Schurman Wallace

Heaven

C.X. Hua

The Broken Bell

Daisy Fried

Graham Greene’s God

As a new biography shows, the British novelist was always haunted by, and uncertain about, his own faith.

John Banville

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Quietly Bracing New Novel

How writing in Italian gave Lahiri a new sense of creative freedom.

Jennifer Wilson