Philip Clark
The Transgressor

RJ Smith’s biography of Chuck Berry examines his subject’s instinct for crossing the line musically, racially, and morally.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Finding My Roots

The storytellers who taught me over the course of my career all knew how to bring Black history vividly to life.

Gregory Afinogenov
Field Maneuvers

An authoritative biography of General Kutuzov strips away the layers of propaganda that have encrusted its subject since 1812.

Charlie Lee
The Way of All Flesh

In The Love of Singular Men, Victor Heringer scrambles genres—tragic romance, pulpy noir, family drama—to plumb the false solace that narrative promises.

Against the Rubble

a poem by 
Arthur Sze

Nature loves to hide—
stopping on a trail
I spot a horned lizard

that, stilled near my shoes
against the rubble
of sandstone and quartz…

Free from the Archives

One hundred and sixteen years ago today, the Plaza Hotel opened on Central Park South (on the site of an earlier, smaller Plaza Hotel, which itself had opened on October 1, 1890). In August 2017, April Bernard wrote an appreciation for the Review of the storied hotel’s most mischievous tenant, Eloise, who since 1955 has lived on the top floor and endeavored, in her own words, to be “a nuisance” to everyone who stays there.

April Bernard
Eloise: The Feral Star

“Gleeful, greedy, prone to random acts of violence—although she is never malicious—loquacious and haughty, this is no mere six-year-old; she is scarcely human, and not especially female…. Eloise is more like a feral Truman Capote, yammering on the phone and terrorizing the staff of the Plaza while knowing others will tidy up the mess.”

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