B. Traven: Fiction’s Forgotten Radical

The enigmatic author’s anarcho-communist politics seep into his novels about wage labor, class consciousness, and the violence of capital. 

Clinton Williamson

How ‘Things’ In Fiction Shape the Way We Read

Sarah Wasserman’s recent book looks at how the objects we take for granted in stories can reveal even deeper meaning.

Sophie Haigney

Philip Guston’s Peculiar History Lesson

On the painter’s politics of self-questioning.

Barry Schwabsky

To Julia de Burgos

Julia de Burgos and Ilan Stavans

Ann Arbor doesn’t need streetlights

Courtney Faye Taylor

Anti-Facts and Anti-Vaxx

Why would I take the vaccine when I’ve already injected myself with bleach?

Tom Tomorrow

Alternative Facts

Calvin Trillin

Are We Living in an Age of Strongmen?

A new book by Ruth Ben-Ghiat discusses the past and present challenges posed by authoritarianism, but misses the social and economic conditions in which it arises.

David A. Bell

The General, the Mistress, and the Love Stories That Blind Us

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez discusses her new book on Isabel Cooper, a Filipina American actress and Douglas MacArthur’s lover.

Noah Flora

Gogol’s Bullshit Jobs

His biting satires of Russian bureaucracy examined the random cruelty and arbitrary hierarchy of an empire in crisis.

Jennifer Wilson