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

A 1980 case study from England depicts a young man with an IQ of 126, excellent performance in his university classes, normal social skills, and basically no brain. Trees can anticipate, cooperate, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

In May 2019, the German Bundestag passed a resolution declaring the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement anti-Semitic. According to the text, the movement’s call to withhold economic support ...

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 ...

The Childhood of Jesus, by J. M. Coetzee. Penguin Books. 288 pages. $16. The Schooldays of Jesus, by J. M. Coetzee. Penguin Books. 272 pages. $16. The Death of Jesus ...

On the Marble Cliffs, by Ernst Jünger, translated from the German by Tess Lewis. New York Review Books. 144 pages. $14.95. Ernst Jünger is the intractable land mine of German literature. Demolition ...

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.