Sponsored by The Leon Levy Center for Biography

Christine Smallwood
The Exorcist

Bret Easton Ellis’s novels are filled with beautiful actors in nightmarish dreamscapes who seem innocent but are revealed to be guilty.

Amy Knight
Putin’s Folly

A year after the invasion of Ukraine, Russia is mired in a seemingly endless military conflict. Is Putin the master tactician underestimating his adversary?

Alejandro Chacoff
The Unbearable Weight of Levity

In Clarice Lispector’s newspaper columns and crônicas, she seems sensorially overcharged by the quotidian, needing only the tiniest slice of existence to feed her writing.

Orville Schell
Appeasement at the Cineplex

Unable to resist China’s huge market, Hollywood has proven willing to alter its films to avoid offending Beijing.

Ingrid D. Rowland
An Exceptional Witness

Unable to resist China’s huge market, Hollywood has proven willing to alter its films to avoid offending Beijing.

Moises Saman
Collide, Collude, Confront

I was in Iraq to report “objectively” on the war. Collecting my photographs from two decades there, I wanted to expose the constraints of my perspective.

Purchase

a poem by 
Andrea Cohen

John Bronzina, I
think you could save me.
You have green eyes
and have completed
your training for CPR
for children and adults.
John, I am in the latter
category, and though
my breathing is fine
now, things change rapidly…

Free from the Archives

“[Bret Easton] Ellis published Less Than Zero when he was a twenty-one-year-old student at Bennington College,” notes Christine Smallwood in her review, from our April 6 issue, of Ellis’s latest novel, The Shards, published when he was fifty-nine. “Its cultural impact is hard to overstate.” Less Than Zero was indeed a phenomenon when it came out in 1985, selling 50,000 copies in its first year and, alongside books by Jay McInerney, David Leavitt, and Brad Leithauser, inaugurating a class of young authors who “for the most part write very close to their experience,” as Darryl Pinckney observed for the Review in 1986. “But these days, more often than not, the self has been idealized, in the way people demand that the camera return an air-brushed image of themselves.”

Darryl Pinckney
The New Romantics

“The premise is dangerously narrow—the self-destructiveness of kids with too much time and money. But Ellis has a remarkable ear and the repetitive evenings have a cumulative effect that comes solely from his language.”