Books and Ideas

Among the Believers Among the Believers

Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own is a deft and ambitious four-part biography interweaving the lives of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy and Flannery O'Conn...

May 29, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Vince Passaro

The Liar The Liar

Steal this book.

May 29, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Emily Nussbaum

The Mark of Cain The Mark of Cain

Somewhere, and it's not in this new Everyman's Library edition, James M. Cain betrayed a state secret when he said that "a writer can only write two hours a day." The truth in ...

May 29, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Michael Tolkin

Far From Heaven Far From Heaven

During the early years of the civil rights revolution, Theodore Bilbo, the ferocious segregationist senator from Mississippi, published a book titled Take Your Choice: Separati...

May 29, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Michael Lind

The Other Iran The Other Iran

In the deformed, malignant years of the Ayatollah and the mullahs, women in Iran in the 1980s sometimes found subversive ways to mutiny against the cruelties imposed on them by...

May 29, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Gloria Emerson

What Are They Reading? What Are They Reading?

"Birds of America," by Lorrie Moore

May 25, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Shayna Cohen

She’s So Heavy She’s So Heavy

In 1981 Carolyn Forché published a slim collection of verse, her second, titled The Country Between Us.

May 22, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Meghan O’Rourke

The Misuses of Allegory The Misuses of Allegory

Is José Saramago an anti-Semite?

May 15, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Ilan Stavans

Dare Call It Treason Dare Call It Treason

Few traditions are more American than freedom of speech and the right to dissent.

May 15, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Eric Foner

The Revolution Within The Revolution Within

In the current national climate, the notion that Washington might learn from the experience of former Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev or Mikhail Gorbachev would strike most as...

May 8, 2003 / Books & the Arts / Robert D. English

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