A Turbulent Life: On Amiri Baraka
In 2002, Scott Sherman published this essay on Amiri Baraka. “Yet Baraka still has the power to surprise us.”
Spring 2025
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Post-Hysterics: Zadie Smith and the Fiction of Austerity
For Zadie Smith, the time had come for the radicalism of experiment and the realism of political economy—for a new social realism that was capable of capturing both the mechanics and experience of today’s growing inequality.
The Plutocratic Imagination
Books discussed in this essay: A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan, Knopf, 2010, 288 pp. A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s, 2012, 328 pp. Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris, Little, …
Orhan Pamuk and Modernist Liberalism
In Snow, and in all his best writing, Pamuk creates a drama of modern life in the process of moving toward radical polarization.
The Ambivalence Artist
On the politics and novels of J.M. Coetzee
No Laughing Matter: Martin Amis takes on the Gulag 
House of Meetings by Martin Amis
What is Africa to Me?
Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa by Keith B. Richburg Basic Books, 1997 263 pp $24 In 1923, a then-little-known poet named Langston Hughes embarked for Africa. Just twenty-one years old, Hughes had produced the epochal “The Negro …
Some Tickets Are Better
With the publication of The Price of the Ticket, James Baldwin presents the work on which he wants to be judged and by which he would like to be remembered. The volume contains fifty-one essays, twenty-five of them previously uncollected. …
