Books & Literary Life
Literary criticism, author interviews, and book culture from within and beyond Harvard.
Tara Menon’s Debut Novel Combines Friendship, Grief, and Climate Disaster
The popular Harvard English professor published Under Water this spring.
The Bible and the Almanac
How Pete Seeger got his start: an excerpt from Alec Wilkinson's new biography, The Protest Singer
Music, Taken Personally
A music critic reviews composer John Adams’s memoir.
Chapter & Verse
Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words
Vistas of Perfection
A profile of writer James Agee, at Harvard and beyond
by Adam Kirsch
Chasing Bogeys
A novel book on golf
Off the Shelf
Recent books with Harvard connections
Laughing at Slavery
In Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery, Glenda Carpio describes how slavery has provided a background and a source of raw material for African-American humor.
The Alcotts, Père and Fille
John Matteson, who left the law to pursue literature, won a Pulitzer Prize for Eden’s Outcasts, his double biography of Bronson and Louisa May Alcott.
From Literature to the Lab
In this excerpt from his new book, The Art and Politics of Science, Nobel laureate Harold Varmus reflects on his switch from graduate work in English to medical school.
On Judicial Interpretation
Paul M. Barrett reviews The Invisible Constitution, by Loeb University Professor Laurence H. Tribe.