Erika Meitner's new book, Ideal Cities, is out, and I think I am in love. I was a little worried, as you always are when a friend publishes a book. What if you don't like it? What if you can't even make ...

Among the illustrations in this volume there is an AP news photo from the Russian district of Bogorodsk, dated 1950, of a crowd of people carrying icons out of a church. This isn't a religious procession; ...

A guide to “moral conduct in the insurgent battlespace.”

The past weeks have witnessed the unhappy spectacle of an academic star fallen into disgrace. Marc Hauser was placed on a one-year leave by Harvard, after a three-year internal investigation into scientific ...

Earlier this year, Britain's The Guardian asked thirty acclaimed novelists what ten rules guide their fiction writing. Among the participants was Jonathan Franzen, whose novel The Corrections became a ...

Amid the most far-reaching changes in publishing since the introduction of the printing press, it may seem presumptuous to mark the 15th anniversary of Books & Culture, but the occasion is nevertheless ...

It being hurricane season and the fifth anniversary of Katrina, I've been reading books about the Gulf Coast, Katrina, the Big Easy—among them, Patricia Smith's Blood Dazzler (2008),a powerful collection ...

As a regular visitor to Arts & Letters Daily, the broadsheet-style web portal of ideas founded by New Zealand philosopher Denis Dutton and now operated by the Chronicle of Higher Education, I was confronted ...

The following is a story that attempts to show how a recent novel could have happened. It is not the story. It is not even a plausible story. Sometimes it reads like fairy tale and at other times like ...

What happens when a spy has Alzheimer’s?

I was prepared to like, nay, love Martha Nussbaum's new book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. What's not to love about a title that promises to argue for a humanistic ideal of education ...

If you have never balanced a chemical equation, if you think chemical bonds are long-term investments in a maker of turpentine or Teflon®, then you may have missed the flurry of books based on the ...

Last week I paid a visit to one of my favorite bookstores, Eighth Day Books in Wichita, Kansas. Its stock is arrayed in a Dutch barn-style house built in the 1920s; the fiction, poetry, and criticism ...

The novel, Georg Lukacs claimed, is "the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God." Most accounts of the modernist novel tend to rely on a standard narrative of secularization, in which modernity ...

Books & Culture’s 15th Anniversary Issue.

Brett McCracken, a self-described "27-year-old evangelical," is the author of Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide, recently published by Baker. An article by McCracken on the subject of ...

Sometimes in late June, garden clubs from other cities visit my garden as a part of an all-day tour of Vancouver. I used to be terrified of these groups—as if they might peruse my clothes' closet—but ...

I think I have read Susan Karant-Nunn's 1997 book, The Reformation of Ritual, more times than anyone else alive. (A few years ago when I was in New York, a friend of mine told me he was "going to a lecture." ...

In the September/October 2002 issue of Books & Culture, Agnieszka Tennant interviewed the Polish poet and essayist Adam Zagajewski ["Try to Praise the Mutilated World"]. Since that time, another volume ...

Americans have no shortage of books on the Pilgrim Fathers, and they annually renew quaint impressions of the Plymouth colonists dining with Native Americans at the first Thanksgiving. But in Making Haste ...