Is That All There Is? Is That All There Is?
It's hard to resist the misery of V.S. Naipaul's late fiction, hard not to surrender to its bleak and wary authority.
Dec 9, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Michael Wood
Subcontinental Homesick Blues Subcontinental Homesick Blues
Nearly twenty years ago, in a village in the western Indian state of Rajasthan, a young woman called Roop Kanwar was burned to death at her husband's funeral pyre.
Dec 9, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Siddhartha Deb
Operation Self-Destruction Operation Self-Destruction
This article, from the August 26, 1968, issue of The Nation, is a special selection from The Nation Digital Archive. If you want to read everything The Nation has ever published on...
Dec 8, 2004 / Feature / Karl M. Purnell
What Are They Reading? What Are They Reading?
I've never had a strong appetite for travel literature.
Dec 7, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Stacy Torres
False Promises False Promises
In American Dream, his masterful new book about welfare reform, Jason DeParle brings together two groups of people who rarely seem to meet: welfare policy-makers and welfare reci...
Dec 2, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Jennifer Egan
Body Heat Body Heat
After the Kinsey Report but before the first Penthouse Forum, John Updike wrote, "He kneels in a kind of sickness between her spread legs.
Dec 2, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Mark Lotto
The War That Never Was The War That Never Was
As war threatened Europe in the 1930s, a physicist turned to a psychiatrist to help understand the impending violence.
Dec 2, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Russell Jacoby
Hostile Obituary for Derrida Hostile Obituary for Derrida
On October 10, the New York Times published a front-page obituary for French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
Nov 24, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Ross Benjamin
The Interpreters of Maladies The Interpreters of Maladies
Derrida was often misunderstood, but rarely worse than in his New York Times obituary. Ross Benjamin explains, in a web-only feature.
Nov 24, 2004 / Books & the Arts / Adam Shatz