Tolkien Against the Grain
The Lord of the Rings is a book obsessed with ruins, bloodlines, and the divine right of aristocrats. Why are so many on the left able to love it?
Spring 2025
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Mircea Cărtărescu Stares Down the Abyss
The Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu boasts a long, international-award-winning bibliography of poetry and prose. Yet in his fiction, he often speaks through narrators hostile to publication and recognition.
We Loved Each Other Too Much
In Sally Rooney’s latest novel, class struggle is presented as just one more thing to be debated.
All Shook Up: The Politics of Cultural Appropriation
In the era of global capitalism, imagining the lives of others is a crucial form of solidarity.
France’s Philosopher-Presidents
Emmanuel Macron’s recent eight-hour debate with dozens of academics follows a long line of French leaders who champion intellectual discourse. But you can’t read your way out of a crisis.
The City and Its Prey
In his monumental novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, psychiatrist and aesthetic contrarian Alfred Döblin captured the Weimar Berlin that he knew from his patients.
The Ideology of Fossil Fuels
Imagining a low-carbon world means revisiting our conception of freedom itself.
Dic Lit
In his survey of the writing of dictators, Daniel Kalder is so dismissive of the tyrants’ actual ideas that it becomes difficult to understand why they had any power in the first place.
All that Dissipates Must Descend
In her short stories, Ottessa Moshfegh chronicles downward mobility on the part of the privileged—and in so doing exposes their unfitness to rule, if not to exist.
Nevertheless, She Persisted
Set on and around the New York City waterfront, Jennifer Egan’s new novel Manhattan Beach offers a feminism suited to the “lean in” age.
The Apocalyptic Baldwin
I Am Not Your Negro shows how James Baldwin became disillusioned about the possibility of any peaceful resolution to racism, but underplays the force of his internationalist and anti-capitalist perspective.
Between the Lines
A new collection of Elena Ferrante’s correspondence and interviews illuminates how Ferrante pulled away from a male-dominated tradition to define her own genre of popular feminist literature.
[EVENT | October 6] Fall Issue Reading Party
Join us on Thursday, October 6 for an evening of short readings from our Fall issue.
After Irony
Can affect theory help us understand our contemporary unease—and express our dreams for the future—without becoming a stand-in for the slow, hard work of politics?
Eighty Years Since Bread and Wine: Ignazio Silone’s Christian Socialism
Ignazio Silone’s 1936 classic served as a moral compass to a generation of U.S. leftists seeking alternatives both to capitalism and to Soviet-style communism.
