To the novelist A.S. Byatt, studying history is partly a way of understanding her own time. “In many ways if you write a novel about the past,” she has said, “you find yourself saying more about the habits of mind of the present than if you take the present head on.” In novels such as […]

The photograph on the cover of Toni Morrison’s new book A Mercy shows a stern intellectual: the Nobel Prize winner, the author of novels that have changed the way America sees itself. In her work, too, she has been implacable in her determination to expose America’s forgotten past. A brilliant stroke of timing: A Mercy came out in the euphoric week of America’s presidential election…

Like so many mysteries, it started with a body. While Russell Shorto was working on The Island at the Center of the World, his best-selling history of New York City’s Dutch origins, he came across a footnote about René Descartes. Specifically, it was about what happened to the French philosopher’s body after his death in […]

Lisa Jardine’s new book Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (HarperPress, 2008) opens in 1688 with the coup that put Holland’s William of Orange on the throne of England. The “Glorious Revolution,” the British historian and biographer argues, was not a revolution at all, but a Dutch conquest. She proceeds, through personal and public documents, to trace the bonds between the two countries…

In the Washington Post, I talk to Michael Chabon about genre, literature, and his adventure story “Gentlemen of the Road.”

What constitutes a cultural identity? Is it connected to home, to language, to being part of a group, to being on TV? Is it tied to history? Can history be rewritten? Novelist Michael Chabon and culture critic Daniel Mendelsohn have both published books in which they look at identity and its representation through the lens […]

Much of Miranda July’s work, from her early videos and performances to her recent film “Me and You and Everyone We Know” and her current collection of short stories, “No One Belongs Here More Than You,” has explored loneliness and isolation and their opposites, belonging and community. Alongside her own […]