We were surprised to discover that Louis Begley, consummate chronicler of Waspy things, had written a “biographical essay” on Franz Kafka. (Perhaps we shouldn’t have been: Both men, besides being ...

As an experienced biographer, Hermione Lee knows a hungry audience. “Readers of biography are greedy readers, with an insatiable appetite for detail and story,” writes the British scholar, a professor ...

NEW YORK — Essays by Cynthia Ozick, a biography of Emperor Hirohito and a novel about two decomposing lovers were among the winners this week at the National Book Critics Circle Awards. Ozick, a ...

It’s hard to read Phillip Lopate’s “The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays from Colonial Times to the Present” without recalling John D’Agata’s three-volume “A New History of the Essay,” ...

MR. SABINE has attempted in these volumes to present in a judicial spirit a chapter of our Revolutionary history which usually bears the most of passion in its recital, — believing, as he does, that ...