Books & Literary Life

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

Book cover featuring vibrant underwater plants and coral with the title "Under Water" by Tara Menon.

Tara Menon’s Debut Novel Combines Friendship, Grief, and Climate Disaster

The popular Harvard English professor published Under Water this spring.

by Andrés Muedano

Tom Hyry photographed in Houghton Library

Tom Hyry

What Harvard's special collections librarian has learned from athletics, activism

by Max J. Krupnick

Photographic portrait of Virginia Woolf

Shakespeare’s Uncanny Presence

Marjorie Garber explores the bard’s influence on the Bloomsbury Group.

Andrew Shtulman illustrates imagination with an image of children riding a cloud as if it were a horse.

Off the Shelf

Recent books with Harvard connections

Painting, The storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789, artist unknown

How Revolutions Happen

Robert Darnton on the origins of the French Revolutionary temperament

Anna Schwartz at U.S. Treasury Department 1982

Anna Jacobson Schwartz

Brief life of a pioneering economist: 1915-2012

by Jennifer Burns

Jarvis Givens and Clint Smith

Black Students Speak

Jarvis Givens on two centuries of African American education 

by Lydialyle Gibson

sweeping aerial view of blue sky and Quabbin Reservoir water and mountains

Journey into Quabbin Reservoir’s Hidden Past

Rambling around the Quabbin Reservoir

by Nell Porter-Brown

Scroll depicting Commodore Perry’s 1853 invasion of Japan

Speaking Volumes

Glimpsing Harvard’s East Asian language materials collection

by Nell Porter-Brown

A March 1, 1965, civil rights meeting at Selma’s Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church

Getting Close, in Selma

Acting at a moment of conscience

by Drew Gilpin Faust

Illustration of housing outside a central city

State-Sponsored Discrimination

The role of zoing law and housing in making America more unequal—and what to do about it