What’s New at The New York Review of Books?

Last week, The New York Review of Books, the biweekly chronicle of American intellectual life that will turn 45 next year, lost one of its founding editors when Elizabeth Hardwick passed away at the age of 91. It was a deeply sad moment for The Review, which had lost another beloved editor, Barbara Epstein, just Read More

Another Brief and Daring Bio: Teasing, Tangled Melville Yarn

Herman Melville , by Elizabeth Hardwick. Lipper/Viking, 161 pages, $19.95.

The English excel at writing brief lives, a pocket-size genre long on style, short on facts. Invented by the second-century Roman historian Suetonius ( Lives of the Caesars ), aped by John Aubrey as an alternative to 17th-century dinner-party gossip, epitomized by Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Read More