How Long Can You Live Your Ideals?
Stories about revolutionaries seem to entrance readers and moviegoers alike—especially if they don’t end well.

Stories about revolutionaries seem to entrance readers and moviegoers alike—especially if they don’t end well.

Annoying characters let us admit that we might be annoying too.

Tayari Jones’s new novel, Kin, is a steely portrait of friendship and fate.

A puritan strain is manifesting in realist novels as a marked absence of straight sex.

Trump’s vision for the arts is nothing like what John F. Kennedy’s was.

Writing a great memoir about choosing a “good enough” life, it turns out, is hard.

Its museums, more than any others, shape the nation’s narrative. No wonder the country argues about it.

Rabih Alameddine, who won the National Book Award last month, has described his idiosyncratic approach as “childish rebelliousness.”

Tamar Adler’s food writing doubles as a philosophy of kitchen scraps.

The explosion of novels about intense female friendships, in the Elena Ferrante mold, is changing the genre—and making it more fun.
