Books & Literary Life
Literary criticism, author interviews, and book culture from within and beyond Harvard.
Making Money Funny
Matt Levine’s spunky Bloomberg column
by Max J. Krupnick
Chapter & Verse: Who wrote...?
Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words
The "King of Palindromes"
Mark Saltveit and the art of the palindrome
by Nancy Walecki
Off the Shelf
Recent books with Harvard connections
Critique and Joy
Kevin Young’s anthology of African American poetry, from Phillis Wheatley to hip hop
by Elisa New
Origin Stories
Bow and Arrow’s mechanic, James Agee’s creative turbulence
by Primus VI
Open Book: Hiding in a Tick Mattress
Wilfred Rembert’s escape from a lynching
The Layered Histories in Black Family Keepsakes
Tiya Miles traces a mother and daughter’s story through a cotton sack.
by Juliet Isselbacher
Amartya Sen, a Memoir
The book covers the first thirty years of the Nobel-prize winning economist’s life.
by Sugata Bose
Re-remembering Juneteenth
Annette Gordon-Reed discusses her unusually personal book on the holiday.
by Lydialyle Gibson
Namwali Serpell
The professor of English is also a novelist and a critic.
by Jonathan Shaw