In Marisa Meltzer’s biography, Birkin is not primarily a muse. She is an artist who mixed glamor and humility, courage and vulnerability.

Her very long memoir, Book of Lives, is packed with minute day-to-day detail—but is strangely quiet on a few big subjects.

The far north has long been a region of exceptional international cooperation. But Trump’s designs on Greenland come at a time of growing instability.

Bird by Bird encouraged would-be writers to blast past their hang-ups and embrace “shitty first drafts.” But there’s more to the creative process.

A far from exhaustive guide to the books that our critics dissected, debated, and most admired this year.

Her memoir frequently shows an indifference toward truth, falsity, and meaning. In that way, it’s an artifact of our age.

Life After Cars dares to imagine how different, and enriching, a car-free world could be.

Hu Anyan’s I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is a record of fleeting impressions, irritations, and reflections from the edges of exhaustion.

His letters are almost exhaustive accounts of daily life—every good meal, every conversation, every dalliance.

What We Can Know imagines a collapsed society, devoid of art and ravaged by rising waters.

A new book recovers the origins of a movement recently championed by Sam Bankman-Fried.

Histories of the epidemic tend to focus on coastal cities, but the response was very different in the middle of the country.

The author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie often spoke of a woman whose life mirrored her own but ended tragically.

In nurse romances written under a pseudonym, Howe began working through the questions that would sustain and bewilder her.

The Hungarian author’s intricate and complex style has aggravated some and deterred many. Until now.

László Krasznahorkai, who was awarded the prize on Thursday, is a brilliant novelist and consummate laureate. But has the Swedish Academy lost its sense of fun?

John J. Lennon’s book, written in his twenty-fourth year in prison, provides a bracing reckoning with guilt, remorse, and the possibility of change.

Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness follows four friends through personal and political upheavals.

Bench Ansfield’s Born in Flames argues that landlords—driven by financialization and the development of insurance “brownlining” in the 1960s and 1970s—are largely to blame.