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A forthcoming romance novel by the writer Sophie Lark was pulled by her publisher after drawing criticism from readers over dialogue that some found racist or that praised Elon Musk. The novel, “Sparrow and Vine,” was due out in April from Bloom Books as the first in a new romance series about a woman who … Read more

Pierre Joris, a poet and translator who tackled some of the 20th century’s most difficult verse, rendering into English the complex work of the German-Romanian poet Paul Celan, died on Feb. 27 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 78. His wife, Nicole Peyraffite, said the cause was complications of cancer. Mr. Joris was the … Read more

OUTSIDE of its famous first line — “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” — “The White Album” is most often cited in retellings of the era’s most notorious crime story. The “murder of five” to which Didion alludes in the essay’s first paragraph is the grisly killing that rocked Hollywood and the world. … Read more

Memories fade. Documentation disappears. Scenes vanish. When you’re busy creating a world, you don’t always think about how to preserve it for history. So old fliers and magazines get brittle and crumble, photos get lost, publications go out of business and websites get deleted. It falls to archivists — sometimes from a scene itself, and … Read more

A sweeping history of Native Americans and a study of the creation of the port of Los Angeles in the 19th century have won this year’s Bancroft Prize, one of the most distinguished honors for scholars of American history. Kathleen DuVal’s “Native Nations: A Millennium in North America,” published by Random House, was described by … Read more

I LEAVE IT UP TO YOU, by Jinwoo Chong Nearly half a decade after the W.H.O. declared Covid-19 a pandemic, I’ve found that recalling the contagion’s early days is a struggle. Instead of blurring together, the memories have fractured into a dangerous mound of shards I’d prefer to leave undisturbed. So how invigorating it was … Read more

NO LESS STRANGE OR WONDERFUL: Essays in Curiosity, by A. Kendra Greene “It is a thing the essay loves: to tend, carefully, painstakingly, to the fact of the world,” A. Kendra Greene writes in “No Less Strange or Wonderful,” her new book of essays. “Sheer material, corporeal existence, all its textures and interactions, what any … Read more

When Michael Visontay’s mother died in 2020, he came upon a vast cache of his family’s papers. These held aspects of family history he already knew — such as the deportation of his father, Ivan, from Hungary to Auschwitz as a teenager, and the death of Ivan’s mother there — but also plenty of surprises, … Read more

THE UNWORTHY, by Agustina Bazterrica; translated by Sarah Moses Writers have long been preoccupied with the end of the world, though perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the true preoccupation is with whatever new, tenuous social order struggles up from the rubble. What would starting over look like? And are human beings … Read more

For years before she published “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee wrote short stories with themes that she would later explore in that now-classic novel: small town gossip and politics, tender and tense relationships between fathers and daughters, race relations. She tried and failed to get them published. Scholars and biographers have long thought the … Read more