Brontez Purnell is nothing if not prolific. The author of seven books, most recently Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt: A Memoir in ...

On Thomas Merton, by Mary Gordon. Shambhala. 160 pages. $22.95. The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton’s account of his conversion to Catholicism in 1938 and his subsequent entry into a Trappist ...

We will never know how many died during the Butlerian Jihad. Was it millions? Billions? Trillions, perhaps? It was a fantastic rage, a great revolt that spread like wildfire, consuming everything in ...

The word “relevant,” I was recently surprised to discover, shares an etymology with the word “relieve.” This seems obvious enough once you know it—only a few letters separate the words—but their ...

Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, by Karl Marx. Edited by Paul North and Paul Reitter. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press. 944 pages. $39.95. Our doomed thought ...

Let’s start with a wicked little paragraph. Guy Debord chose to kill himself the old-fashioned way; Jean-Luc Godard—“the dumbest Swiss Maoist of them all,” in the words of the amusing ...

Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, by Northrop Frye. Princeton University Press. 408 pages. $22.95. The New Science, by Giambattista Vico. Translated from the Italian by Jason Taylor and Robert C.

The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan. Scribner. 352 pages. $28. After a night of partying, two of Lizzie’s closest friends went swimming in the East River, and one was carried away by a current and ...

Hubris: The American Origins of Russia’s War Against Ukraine, by Jonathan Haslam. Harvard University Press. 368 pages. $29.95. The Folly of Realism: How the West Deceived Itself About Russia and ...

I first read the Book of Revelation in a green pocket-size King James New Testament published by the motel missionaries Gideons International. I was in seventh grade. I remember reading the tiny Bible ...

Twenty-five years ago, the philosopher Richard Rorty accomplished something many writers aspire to but few ever pull off: he predicted the future. Toward the end of his 1998 book Achieving Our Country ...

The Other Name: Septology I–II, by Jon Fosse. Translated by Damion Searls. Transit Books. 336 pages. $17.95. I Is Another: Septology III–V, by Jon Fosse. Translated by Damion Searls. Transit Books.