Edgar Allan Poe’s downward trajectory By Frances Wilson
The subversive sexuality of the literary vampire By A. K. Blakemore
The modern cult of Vermeer By James Hall
Reflections on writing, addiction and Monet’s water lilies By Marie Darrieussecq
WORLD LITERATURE TODAY: The latest issue features ‘Reading in Tasmania’. The 100th year of continuous publication gifts readers all their favorite genres—a profusion of essays, poetry, book reviews, creative nonfiction, fiction, interviews, a booklist for Trans Awareness Month, a postcard from Colombia, and more. Emma Wilkins’s essay on Tasmanian literature provides the cover feature, and translated work from China, Egypt, Mexico, Quebec, and Russia enlivens the issue. Reviews of new books by Solvej Balle, Emmanuel Carrère, Victoria Chang, Edwidge Danticat, Jon Fosse, and dozens more round out the year with essential reading-list titles.
An Essay by Aruni Kashyap
by Basem Nabres
by Omar Hammash
Do the Fondation Beyeler’s new buildings by Peter Zumthor fit in with the rest of the site designed by Renzo Piano? Perhaps they aren’t trying to
The October auctions are always a test of the health of the art market, but there’s more than one way to read the results
From the November 2026 issue of Apollo. About a decade ago I found myself in a private room at the Arts Club on Dover Street in Mayfair explaining the reasons for my selection of that year’s international exhibitions, biennnials and art fairs to a table of wealthy diners. The expensively, if discreetly, dressed group – […]
Guy Savoy is the first chef ever to be elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in France. A meal at his restaurant in Paris proves why he deserves this unprecedented honour
THE NEW CRITERION: The November 2026 issue, edited by Roger Kimball, features major pieces including “Notes & Comments,” David Butterfield’s “The classical inheritance, III: Bound by the book,” Lionel Shriver’s “What do progressives really want?,” D. J. Taylor’s “Spark’s fire,” Cory L. Andrews’s “Hippolyte Taine,” and a collection of “New poems” by David Mason, Jehanne Dubrow, and Robert Chandler, alongside dedicated columns covering reflections, theater, art, music, media, fiction, book reviews, and a notebook segment.
POETRY LONDON MAGAZINE: The latest issue features new work from Liz Berry, Hannah Lowe, Ahren Warner, and Maura Dooley. We also have prose by Joey Connolly, an interview between Clara–Læïla Laudette and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, and reviews of Helen Mort, Dean Browne, Karen Solie, and Jorie Graham.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha explains that her poems—written over a decade from a position of relative safety in the US—did not target a specific reader, but rather reflect an evolving, non-linear attempt to communicate across a broad and complex readership profoundly shaped by ongoing trauma and genocide.
In her new collection Killing Spree, poet Jorie Graham evokes the dual-headed Roman deity Janus to confront a precarious present by looking back at an out-of-reach past while facing a distressing, violent future.
Blown Rose and Dialect Press sum up some small press publishing. By Julia Bird, Mike Sims, Juliette Morton
GUERNICA MAGAZINE: The latest issue features striking artwork alongside fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and interviews that explore how human understanding takes shape through sensation, memory, and intuition—ranging from Liane Strauss’s inquiry into AI and Emily Dickinson’s poetry to Mirza Waheed’s Kashmiri childhood recollections, Georgi Gospodinov’s poignant tale of progressive hearing loss, Marcelle Shehwaro’s visceral reflections on surviving Aleppo’s airstrikes, previously unpublished letters by Robert Frost, Nattiya Nadaham’s dance-rooted personal essay on Tamil resistance, and evocative poetry by Melissa Studdard and Arman Salem.
“What do you want from a poem? Do you go to poems for facts and information, or do you seek out poems because they express singular observations in unpredictable language, stir the imagination, open up possibilities?” By Liane Strauss
“It’s the way of the world, new in place of the old, but still, all those trees and plants and vegetables and flowers, so good and lush and kind somehow.” By Mirza Waheed
“If you can, choose a building surrounded by taller ones. The logic is that your neighbors would be bombed before you.”By Marcelle Shehwaro
“And you mustn’t forget to include Kay in your all-round felicitations; for you don’t need to take my word for it, you can find internal evidence in the book itself that but for her there would have been no seventh book.” By Robert Frost
Anne Carson’s juggling act By Tristram Fane Saunders
The story of gardens and their cultural significance By David E. Cooper
Buried dreams of a small-town prodigy By Beejay Silcox
A flawed but brilliant poet ‘dealt a cruel hand by fate’ By Gabriel Josipovici
In The Nerd Reich Gil Durán shows how Silicon Valley billionaires have pushed a fringe ideology—what is popularly called techno-fascism but is closer in aspiration to straight-up totalitarianism—into the affairs of state.
The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy by Gil Durán
La Bola Negra sidesteps the vicious politics of the Spanish Civil War to tell a story about gay sexual freedom.
La Bola Negra a film directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi
George Sand’s scandalous life, including a decade-long affair with Chopin, has obscured the influence of her many novels.
Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand by Fiona Sampson
Bennie Thompson’s trailblazing career came after the success of the Voting Rights Act and could end with its fall.
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: The latest issue features Fredric the Great by Toril Moi; Trump’s Consigliere by Deborah Friedell; Prediction Markets by Geoff Mann; Prynne’s People by Iain Sinclair; and Theibaud’s Sweet Tooth by Paul Keegan….
Fredric Jameson seemed to me to have read absolutely everything. He was the very antithesis of the intellectual type I think of as an empty theoriser, by which I mean someone who endlessly conjectures without having a genuine command of any relevant archive. To look at Fred as a reader of literature is not to reduce the scope of his work, but rather to try to understand its origins.
Nothing reliable is known about the life of Homer, yet two founding poems of Western literature bear his name. Harold Bloom, who said he could read and absorb a 400-page book in an hour, left a monument made not of poems but of memory. A new essay sets them face to face, with a third reader between them.
Why we’re pointing you there
Bloom held that every strong writer survives the past by misreading it on purpose, swerving from a precursor to make room for something new. Michael Cummins sets that theory against a reader Bloom never met: a language model, trained on a large share of everything written. The essay moves through scenes rather than abstractions. In 1926 the editor of Poetry asked Hart Crane, whose poems were the first book Bloom ever owned, to explain how dice could “bequeath an embassy,” and Crane’s answer became a defense of the unlikely line. A singer in 1930s Yugoslavia swore he sang a song “word for word and line for line,” and the recordings showed he hadn’t. In 2023 a chatbot supplied a federal court decision, signed with a real judge’s name, that no judge had ever written.
Along the way come Benjamin Franklin rebuilding essays from The Spectator, Helen Keller’s trial over a story she didn’t know she remembered, BloomBloom’s one novel and the precursor he couldn’t escapersquo;s one novel and the precursor that haunted it, and a singer in the Odyssey pleading for his life: “Self-taught am I.” The essay says plainly that it was drafted with Claude. It leaves one question open: when a writer can ask, at any hour, for the likeliest next line of anything, will that writer still learn to want the line no one else could have written?
Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious
