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
A Singular Woman’s Biographer
Janny Scott '77 introduces Barack Obama's mother to a wider audience.
by Maya E. Shwayder
The Brain As Art
Carl Schoonover ’06 merges science and aesthetics.
by Sarah Zhang
Ants through the Ages
In two new books, E.O. Wilson and his coauthors introduce pioneer myrmecologist José Celestino Mutis, and the ants that are "the most complex socially of all animals, except for humans."
by Spencer Lee Lenfield
Off the Shelf
Recent books with Harvard connections
Devoted to Debt
Nancy Koehn reviews Louis Hyman's Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink.
by Nancy F. Koehn
Swerves
Stephen Greenblatt traces the influence of Lucretius, through De Rerum Natura, on modern thought.
by Christian Flow
Fakery and Shakespeare
A con man, his son, and a fiction on two levels
by Amelia Atlas
On “Inspiration” and an Ohio Swimming Hole
Orator Joyce Carol Oates and poet Henri Cole at the Phi Beta Kappa Literary Exercises
Phi Beta Kappa to Feature Joyce Carol Oates, Henri Cole
The author will speak, and the poet will read, on May 24.
Civil War Reawakened
Adam Goodheart's new book explores the Civil War.