Longreads

Her decision to become a nun, her image of herself as one, wasn't fed by fantasies of Ingrid Bergman or Audrey Hepburn. By the time she entered the Sisters of the Visitation, the number of…

Schumann, op. 9 I can still hear the satisfaction in Roberto's voice: he'd talked Miguel into shepherding Rosario on her trip to the seashore. And the roguishness: "Everybody knows about…

The Pale KingBy David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown, 548 pp., $27.99) Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free WillBy…

I was looking down the hill, waiting for the rain to start, when his white car pulled into our yard. The driver was a big man, built long and square just like the Oldsmobile. He was wearing a tie…

Oscar Wilde was not a man who lived in fear, but early reviews of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” must have given him pause. The story, telling of a man who never ages while his portrait turns decrepit, appeared in the July, 1890, issue of Lippincott’s, a Philadelphia magazine with English distribution. The Daily Chronicle of London called the tale “unclean,” “poisonous,” and “heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.”

All over the world people are struggling for lives that are worthy of their human dignity. Leaders of countries often focus on national economic growth alone, but their people, meanwhile, are striving for something different: meaningful lives for themselves. Increased GDP has not always made a difference in the quality of people’s lives, and reports of national prosperity are not likely to console those whose existence is marked by inequality and deprivation.

Fifty years ago this week Ernest Hemingway shot himself dead in his Idaho home. Though parodied often (and as recently as in Woody Allen’s new Midnight in Paris), there’s no debating the impact of Hemingway’s outsize personality and distinctive prose. Below, in an essay from our New Literary History of America, the author Keith Taylor considers Hemingway’s style and its roots.

Alex Haley sat at a desk typing notes while Malcolm—tall, austere, dressed always in a dark suit, a white shirt, and a narrow dark tie—drank cup after cup of coffee, paced the room, and talked. What emerged was the hegira of Malcolm’s life as a black man in mid-century America: his transformation from Malcolm Little, born in Omaha to troubled parents whose salve against racist harassment and violence was the black-nationalist creed of Marcus Garvey; to Detroit Red, a numbers-running hustler on the streets of Boston and New York; to a convicted felon known among fellow-prisoners as Satan; to Malcolm X, a charismatic deputy to the Nation of Islam’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, and the most electrifying proponent of black nationalism alive.

In 1965, a few months before graduation, a man from the Job Corps penetrated to the upper floors of Main, the building at Vassar College where the seniors lived, a presumably impregnable niche.…