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
Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words
Poet Frank Bidart Wins the National Book Award
Five other Harvardians were also honored by the National Book Foundation.
by Sophia Nguyen
Father and Son, and E.E. Cummings
What one undergraduate learned
by James C. Beck
Guy Davenport
Brief life of a polymathic stylist: 1927-2005
by Eric Allen Been
Oenophile Par Excellence
Anne Fadiman ’74 recalls her father, Clifton, in an excerpt from The Wine Lover’s Daughter
Found in Translation
Maureen Freely ’74, longtime translator of Orhan Pamuk, shares the nuances of bringing a text from one language to another.
by Oset Babür
Off the Shelf
Recent books with Harvard connections
“Kingmaker” to Gatekeeper
Stephanie Burt ’94 is the kind of poetry critic who provokes anger in other poetry critics.
by Tara Wanda Merrigan
Believe It or Not!
From the Missouri Compromise to the 2016 election, Kevin Young's Bunk takes stock of American hoaxes, con men, and race fantasies.
by Niela Orr
Chapter & Verse
Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words