Books & Literary Life

Literary criticism, author interviews, and book culture from within and beyond Harvard.

Portrait of a man in a denim shirt beside a blue book cover for "Gretal and the Great War" featuring an illustration of a leg holding an army helmet..

How Adam Ehrlich Sachs Writes Absurd and Beautiful Fiction

The Gretel and the Great War author on how the Lampoon derailed his science career—and set him on a literary path.

by Eric Olson

Image of American Eagle crashing into a whirlpool

Democracy Endangered

American democracy endangered by minority rule

crowd of people dancing on Mykonos in 1955

Off the Shelf

Recent books with Harvard connections

A smiling woman with brown hair next to three book covers

Living the Science Fiction Fantasy

Novelist Catherine Asaro’s space operas

by Lydialyle Gibson

Ruth Simmons as a young graduate

Educational Ascent

Ruth Simmons on her ascent from sharecropper’s daughter to scholar

Tom Hyry photographed in Houghton Library

Tom Hyry

What Harvard's special collections librarian has learned from athletics, activism

by Max J. Krupnick

Photographic portrait of Virginia Woolf

Shakespeare’s Uncanny Presence

Marjorie Garber explores the bard’s influence on the Bloomsbury Group.

Andrew Shtulman illustrates imagination with an image of children riding a cloud as if it were a horse.

Off the Shelf

Recent books with Harvard connections

Painting, The storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789, artist unknown

How Revolutions Happen

Robert Darnton on the origins of the French Revolutionary temperament

Anna Schwartz at U.S. Treasury Department 1982

Anna Jacobson Schwartz

Brief life of a pioneering economist: 1915-2012

by Jennifer Burns

Jarvis Givens and Clint Smith

Black Students Speak

Jarvis Givens on two centuries of African American education 

by Lydialyle Gibson