Books & Literary Life

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

For This Poet, AI is a Writing Partner

Sasha Stiles trained a chatbot on her manuscripts. Now, her poems rewrite themselves.

by Lydialyle Gibson

A new biography of Louis Kahn

Probing the primal drives of a landmark architect

Reality fiction: the delightful fullness of Elif Batuman's “The Idiot”

Elif Batuman’s novel The Idiot reflects on her Harvard freshman year.

by Madeleine Schwartz

Chapter and verse quotation-citation correspondence site

Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words

Wordsworth seen anew and other recent books

Wordsworth seen anew, and other recent books

Adam Kirsch on Megan Marshall’s Elizabeth Bishop biography

Adam Kirsch reviews Megan Marshall’s biography of poet Elizabeth Bishop.

by Adam Kirsch

Deidre Lynch on Jane Austen and loving literature

Deidre Lynch on the cult of Jane Austen and the complexities of loving literature

by Spencer Lee Lenfield

Open Book: Bare-Knuckle Politics

Contentious American democracy—in a new case-method history book

Recent books with Harvard Connections

Recent books with Harvard connections

Michael Klarman reinterprets the American founding

The anti-democratic origins of the Constitution

by Lincoln Caplan

Chapter and verse quotation-citation correspondence site

Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words