Cool Cat
Our new president has a feline’s legendary nimbleness and luck—but there are downsides to being a cat.
Book Review
Mercy!
Toni Morrison’s new historical novel is a monotonous series of flashbacks, larded with anachronisms.
Imperfect Union
A brilliant new book probes the intimate, unequal relationship between Virginia Woolf and the woman who cared for her.
What Girls Want
A series of vampire novels illuminates the complexities of female adolescent desire.
Suburbs of Our Discontent
Misery and banality in a 1950s Connecticut development—rendered with anatomical precision on the page, and now coming to the screen
Cruel and Unusual
V. S. Naipaul has produced works of extraordinary skill— and lived a life of equally extraordinary callousness.
Torch Song
Remembering the language of lyrics
Should Women Rule?
A clutch of books suggests they can’t rule like men. But there are other ways to run the world.
The Man Who Remade the Met
Unlike most modern museum directors, Philippe de Montebello trusted the public to embrace his high standards—and it did.
Nasty, Brutish, and Short
The narrator of Roth’s Indignation may die off early and horribly—but it’s the reader of this adolescent work who ought to feel the most outraged.