Books & Literary Life
Literary criticism, author interviews, and book culture from within and beyond Harvard.
Matt Levine's Bloomberg Finance Column Makes Money Funny
Matt Levine’s spunky Bloomberg column
Before the Cocktail Napkin
In this excerpt from her new book, Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture, Cammy Brothers discusses how the artist demonstrated the possibility for architecture to be a vehicle for the imagination equal to painting or sculpture.
Off the Shelf
An editorial sampling of recent books with Harvard connections
"Working Sisters"
Pan Tianshu reviews Leslie Chang's new book Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
by Pan Tianshu
Chapter & Verse
A correspondence corner for not-so-famous lost words
Storytelling Scholar
Marie Rutkoski blends sixteenth-century history with fantasy in The Cabinet of Wonders, a new novel for young adults.
Day-After Thoughts: "Words Have Made a Comeback"
Reflections from Humanities Center scholar-in-residence Kiku Adatto on the roles of images and rhetoric in the 2008 campaign and its media coverage
Poetic Patriarch
Craig Lambert profiles the poet Richard Wilbur.
Stinging the Dinosaurs
An excerpt from The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies, by Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson
Carpenter Center's Craftsman
A new book, Le Corbusier Le Grand, pulls together the career of Le Corbusier, with material on Harvard’s Carpenter Center.
Art as Chattel
James Cuno reviews Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures, by Cynthia Saltzman